Eyes: Novellas and Stories

1 THE STOCK

Photo of the author by the author

Mr. Gab didn’t have that gift, though his assistant, who was supposed to be stupid but only looked so, would mutter beneath his breath, when annoyed by his tasks, “he had the gift, he did, did Gab.” Mr. Gab spoke seldom, and then it was to shout at the steel shutters of the shop that were always reluctant to alter their position, whatever it was, and needed to be cajoled, flattered, then threatened. Or sometimes he spoke to the steam pipes, complaining of the knocking, complaining of the excessive heat they gave off when they had to be heated and of the odor that the steam brought to the nose through layers of paint resembling aluminum. Curls the graphs, he said with as close to a curse as he came.

Mr. Gab’s shop was in a part of town so drably uninteresting robbers wouldn’t visit even to case its joints, something Mr. Gab fairly certainly knew, and treasured, but he had these steel shutters left over from a former, more frequented, more luxuriant time, and felt obliged to use them. One could have guessed Mr. Gab’s age from these small facts: that he thought of possible intruders as “robbers,” and worried about being “glommed”—terms which have no present employment. The shutters, window-wide slats of steel in Venetian style, creaked as they descended, and no longer fit firmly together or overlay one another as they had been designed to do in some far-off factory; consequently, streetlights — lit to illuminate an empty avenue whose venerable storefronts were a menace even during the glare of sunny afternoons — would streak into the shop at night where Mr. Gab might still be sitting, long after closing, long after nodding bye-bye to his stupid assistant, staring at his prints in the darkness, prints that covered the pockmarked walls of the shop, displayed there like dead things hung from nails, as if slain while other prey were being hunted: while picking up fallen apples maybe (though he lived so far from the country), or rather if a brace of grouse were to fling themselves into the apple bag, or while gathering pignuts (models ago he’d sold his car) a pair of pigeons might creep into a handy box — that unlikely — while sorting buckeyes to find the feathers of a turkey, or, while pulling loganberries out of their briaries (though he wore no woolen sleeves), flushing a covey of quail instead — anyway — prizes inadvertently taken, mistakenly developed, proudly framed.

Mr. Gab certainly had his favorites. These were images he knew so intimately they were — well, not quite etched on the balls of his eyes. He needed only the least light to see them down to their last shades of gray: an Atget was frequently imagined to be the state of his street outside — Atget, the documentarian. Perhaps he’d decide on the Atget of an intersection, of Angle de la rue L’homond et de la rue Rataud, its cobbles moist, in late light, sky like sour milk, taken in the quartier du Val-de-Grâce, where on one wall a poster was papered to say un million, un million, a dozen times in a voice not ever husky. “Forever,” Mr. Gab would allow himself sometimes to murmur: cours de danse givre…forever…though the “cours” is gone, “danse” is gone, even before the War arrived in a taxi, they were gone, gone, cobbles gone too, now, probably, building likely, gone, the lamp most certainly, gone, and the teeth of steel, like those of a large rake, that crossed the rue high above every head — sure, sure — that crossed the top of the image straight through the sour-milk sky and over the tree at rue’s end — oh yes — gone, quite gone, even the tree whose feet were hid behind a low wall, deep in the shot where the road disappeared into a vee as though down a drain — ah well — cut by now, blown over, hauled off, firewooded, gone. Dear me.

“What a curb,” Mr. Gab permitted himself to exclaim. At the Louvre…what did the advert advise and proclaim? Who could say? With the wall retreating, the posters defaced. What a glisten though! Still…the curb, the glisten, the deep recession of the street remained. Right outside there, beyond that barred door, beyond the shuttered window, lay Atget’s modest little street still. Still…made of wavering lines of glis and shales of shine. The walk protected by posts. Mr. Gab did not dare to say aloud what he succinctly thought, as he looked out through his engraved eyes: I am Atget — the world is mine.

Only during the evening following work — Mr. Gab thought that way of it, thought of it as work — shortly after he had — well — dined, but before he went slowly to bed, unbuttoning the buttons down his shirt — well, his vest first — seeing the street or some other scene all the while the buttons went as buttons do, loose from their hole, not like released birds because it was shirt that was freed, the vest that flew loose, even if it clung to his slender frame like a woman in a romance to her equally handmade lover — no — the buttons like sentries would stay sewn in their useful line perhaps for an entire shirt life, vest time. In photographs, shirts do not get much attention.

He could of course have chosen to recall the elegant details of Le Restaurant Procope’s façade, the café’s name like a decoration running along in front of the building’s second-floor windows, each letter as bold as an escutcheon affixed to a wrought-iron balcony railing: GRAND RESTAURANT PROCOPE, and then, under the overhang, discreet as a meeting, the name again: Grand Restaurant Procope, no doubt no longer in business though one sign said verte du vins pour ville—oh the hanging lamps were like crowned heads, the walk lined with tables and paired chairs, the hour early, each empty — not the hours but the chairs — a busy day ahead of them, waiting to accommodate customers no longer alive.

Mr. Gab lived as many shopkeepers once did, both at the rear and above his establishment. He slept in a small loft a good size for bats that he reached by climbing the short stair that rose unsteadily from a corner of his kitchen, a kitchen of sorts, in whose foreshortened center Mr. Gab kept a card table and a ceramic cat. Breakfast might be an apple and an egg. Lunch — he frequently passed on lunch, though his stupid assistant ate lunch like a lion, growling over some sandwich distantly fixed. A sip of tea, a chewy biscuit maybe. Memories going back a long way. Mostly, though, he passed on lunch.

Days were dreary — oh yes — especially in a shop stuffed with gray-white gray-black photographs in cellophane sheets that had been loosely sidefiled in cardboard boxes, tag attached, maybe FRENCH XX or COUNTRYSIDE BRITISH or RAILROADS USA. He had three for trees: bare, leafed, chopped. On the walls, clipped to wire hangers that were then hung from nails, were his prizes, displayed so as to discourage buyers. Successfully. So far. For a decade.

Mr. Gab would have six or seven customers on a good day, which is what he would almost audibly say to them when they entered, making the door ring — well it was a rattle really. His stupid assistant would answer most questions, show them the labels on the boxes, wave at the walls hung with hangers, open a filing cabinet or a case for those who fancied the pricier ones, explain the proper technique for sliding a photograph out of its sheathing, demonstrate the underhanded manner of holding it, or, with palms gently placed at edges as if it were a rare recording, explain how one could be safely examined.

The boxes were mostly of a conventional cardboard. They sat on tables or beside tables or under tables as if they’d sat there already a long time: the ink on the labels had faded; the paper of the labels had yellowed; the corners of the labels were munched. Covers were kept closed against dust and light and idle eyes by beanbags, forever in the family, inertly weighing on the boxes’ cardboard flaps. The nails Mr. Gab had driven into the walls were zinc’d, which made them suitable for fastening shingles, but you couldn’t have drawn one out without pulling, along with the shank, large chunks of plaster. The wire hangers themselves were in weary shape. So the pictures hung askew. As if holding on with one hand.

Mr. Gab stocked several versions of the same photograph sometimes. A round red sticker affixed to the wrap signaled a superior print, a green circle indicated one produced from the original negative, but late in its life, whereas a yellow warned the customer that the sheath enclosed a mere reproduction, however excellent it might often be. His red version of rue Rataud was as fine as the one conserved at the Carnavalet, but on the white rectangles with their softly rounded corners which Mr. Gab had pasted to the bottom of each envelope and where he identified the subject, the photographer, the method, and the negative’s likely residence, he had written about the less genuine image, below a yellow ball that suggested caution, the words “trop mauvais état,” a little joke only scholars might understand and enjoy.

Mr. Gab’s provenances were detailed and precise; however, years earlier an envious dealer had accused his rival (for Mr. Gab was then in a dinky shop across from him on another street) (and whom the envious dealer called “Grab,” somehow sensing Mr. Gab’s sensitivity about his name, though unaware that Mr. Gab had become silent in order to avoid being addressed by anyone as “Gabby”) of accepting or otherwise acquiring (during midnight visits and stealthy trips) stolen property. How otherwise, the envious dealer complained, could one account for the presence, in prime condition, of so many rare and important photographs in such shabby shoebox circumstances. “Shoebox” was slanderous, certainly, though nothing had come of these allegations except a shady reputation, thought actually to be desirable in some circles.

A print’s quality depended almost entirely upon its preservation of details, its respect for values. The fog-white sky of rue Rataud, in the version under its cautionary yellow dot, smeared the end of the street so you could not see how or where it turned, walls were muffled, and a hard light made the outlines of the cobbles disappear; while the red-tagged rue Rataud allowed the eye to count windows far away and discern a distant huddle of buildings. In the latter, the spiky rod, whose use he could not fathom, crossed the street in the guise of a determinate dark line; in the former it was dim and insubstantial, as if obscured by smoke. On red’s verbose information label, Mr. Gab had written that his photograph had come to the United States in the luggage of Berenice Abbott from whom he had received a few prime prints of other subjects. If interested, please ask. About the history of yellow, Mr. Gab offered nothing.

The stupid assistant was not sufficiently steeped, so when, as occasionally happened, a customer wished a little history, Mr. Gab would have to hold forth, not reluctantly with regard to the information, which he believed every cultivated person should possess, but reluctantly regards speaking — making noises, choosing words, determining the line of march for a complex chronology. From the box marked DECORATIVE ELEMENTS, for instance, another Atget might be withdrawn, and Mr. Gab could inform his customer that this view of some paneling at the Hôtel Roquelaure had been purchased from Atget by Georges Hoentschel — did he know? — the designer of the Union Centrale pavilion for the 1900 World’s Fair in Paris; and subsequently in an archive of great richness and variety that Hoentschel had catalogued and published in 1908 before it was sold to J. P. Morgan who later donated the entire shebang to New York’s Metropolitan Museum. Someone had dismembered a 1908 catalogue and this image — which you should please hold at its tender edges — is a limb from one of those dismemberments.

Mr. Gab did not usually remark the fact (since some found the fact disturbing) that the door was no doubt long gone, though the photograph was evidence of fine wood and careful workmanship; but because Atget had taken a portion of the decoration’s portrait, the surviving image had increased in value at each exchange and become what Mr. Gab, in a rare moment of eloquence, called “a ghost worth gold.” Nothing touched by this man’s lens was lost, he said, each was elevated by its semblance to sublimity, even the dubious ladies of the XIXe arrondissement, three of them (two leaning one peeking) from the traditional doorway, appetizing if you ate mud, an example of which (not the mud but the unsavory subjects) he, Mr. Gab, had in a box at the back of the shop marked NUES, even though the women were decently dressed.

The light in the store, Mr. Gab’s stupid assistant persisted in judging, “was lousy.” With the shutters closed, you could see how dust-covered the front windows had become, while most of the lamps were simply bulbs housed in coffee cans hung from wires punched through their bottoms. A proper tungsten lamp throwing the appropriately well-wiped light could be found at the rear of the store—“don’t call it a store,” Mr. Gab always protested — where anyone who wore serious eyes could contemplate in quiet a possible purchase. The assistant believed that the entire furnishings of the store: the old oak desk where Mr. Gab presided, the swivel chair, alike in oak, the rose-colored puff upon which he sat when he was seated, the smeary windows, a door which uttered a needless warning, the faded façade from former days, which incorporated a large dim sign spelling P H O T O G R A P H Y in letters that looked as if they wanted nothing to do with one another, the scuffed and cracked linoleum floor, the pocked walls with their swaying trophies, the trestle tables upon which the cardboard boxes stood, or under which they hid, or beside which they huddled, the dumb homely handmade lamps that filled the room with the rattle of tinlight, the tall stool in a back corner where the stupid assistant perched, the rug, instead of a door, which hung over the entrance to Mr. Gab’s private quarters: they were all meant to deceive detectives and most untrained and idle inspection. For the truth was — since the assistant harbored the same opinion as Mr. Gab’s once-a-time rival — the stock was stupendous, of varied kind and exquisite quality, a condition which was quite unaccountable unless the prints had, at one time or other, by someone or other, been pinched.

The assistant, whose apparent stupidity was an effect of his seeming a suitable subject for Diane Arbus, knew, to cite one outré instance, that in a box at the back of the store, and in two Mr. Gab kept in a cleaning closet in his kitchen, were several beautiful pictures set in Sicily and shot in the early fifties by, of all people for Mr. Gab to have discovered, Enzo Sellerio: in particular one from Vizzini of the worn head and shoulders of a woman who had framed herself with a window that in turn was surrounded by rows and rows of descending roof tiles textured to a fare-thee-well — a woman whose gaze was one of total intensity, though her mouth expressed quizzicality, while on the sill lay an aristocracy of fingers, age infecting everything else — her fingers positioned as if she were emerging from the grave of days; then another taken through the flychains of a Palermo doorway so that a seated man, a horse and cart, a church front, and a couple are seen as if scrimmed by a blurring rain of o’s; or the Chiesa Madre’s quiltlike stairway viewed from above as it’s being climbed by a herd of Paternò goats…well, where could this man who went nowhere, rarely to the edge of his neighborhood, have obtained work of this quality without hanky-panky of some kind? Without a lot of miscreation going on behind the back of every member of an honest public.

Oh…yes…Mr. Gab also had a very moving photograph — perhaps a tad mellow — of some trailer-camp kids in Richmond, California, that Ansel Adams had taken with Dorothea Lange’s twin-lens Rolleiflex during the War, cropped and dodged according to his own account, and just how had that dramatic image made its way into a cello envelope and thence to a cardboard box in this silly little shop on Arsenal Avenue except if it were hiding out?

Mr. Gab was as silent about his system of supply as he was about everything else. He sold so seldom he may have been holding most of his stock for years, and in the same boxes too, long before his assistant became old enough to observe any rate of change. Nevertheless, from time to time a very big Russian-looking man in a very heavy Russian-looking coat, though not with a dead animal on his head, which would have made everyone take note, came with wild hatless hair to see, and apparently to consult with, Mr. Gab, going into his quiet private quarters for a little chat, carrying a case large flat and black. The Russian’s big bass would soften as soon as his wide back disappeared behind the rug, which Mr. Gab held open for him as though they were entering a box at the theater. How are you this very day, my boy, the big man would thunder when the stupid assistant greeted him with a wince of recognition and a pleasant surprised smile. Annduh Missterr Gahb, my boy, is he ahbought? His accent, thick as his coat, was too eclectic to be genuine, and had been faked to cover a Russian one, the assistant thought. It was then, at the card table in the company of the ceramic cat, that the case would click open to disclose, the assistant imagined, a wondrous rarity, an August Sander maybe, filched from a German collector, a labor leader in an ill-fitting unpressed dark suit, throttled tie, intense vest, like those Mr. Gab wore, hair receding so it was now a headband, and those arms at his side ending in pugnacious little fists.

But when the assistant went later to look under Sander in the German box he found only the one which had been there through uncounted years: the hotelkeeper and his wife, Gastwirtsehepaar, around 1930, Tweedledum with Tweedledee, posed outside their vine-sided hostelry, she in her polka dot dress and frontally folded arms, he in bow tie and white shirt and hanky, a startle of patches against the compulsory black suit, including vest — black too — tucked under the coat like a head hid in a camera’s hood — uh oh — there’s one button missing, one out of four, too bad, the bottoms of the innkeeper’s trousers hiked in an ungainly fashion above a pair of sturdy polished shoes, black as well, the innkeeper’s arms clasped behind him so that the swell of his stomach would suggest to a hesitant guest hearty fare; well, they were both girthy full-fleshed folk as far as that goes, her eyes in a bit of a squint, his like raisins drowning in the plump of his cheeks.

What made August Sander’s portraits so great—“great” was the appropriate word in the assistant’s opinion — was the way his sitters made visibly manifest, like the backgrounds behind them, the lives that had shaped their pictured faces and forms, as though their daily occupations had drawn them there to be displayed for the camera with all the seriousness suitable to such a show of essential self.

If you were to look at the penetrating portrait Berenice Abbott made of Eugène Atget when he was a wispy-haired old man with sunken cheeks, a mouth relieved of most of its teeth, assertive nose, and intense eyes, you might get a whiff of Mr. Gab too, for he was ancient early, grew up to reach old in a hurry, and then didn’t change much for decades, except to solidify his opinions, much the way Atget had, both men easily angered, both men hugging their habits, each short of speech, and patient as the stones Atget alone gelatinized. Mr. Gab disavowed color with the fervor of a Puritan, and nothing in the shop had a hue you’d want to name beside the dull brown cardboard and the pillow in his chair, because the walls were once a clean cream dirtied now to nondescription, and the lino floor was like a playing board of black/white squares, a design mostly seen unmopped in public toilets, while the rug he’d hung across the door to his digs was a tweed a fade away from tan.

Mr. Gab was a stickler. His ideal was the perfect picture taken on the wing with one shot, and allowed to emerge from its development like a chick its egg, so that one saw not just the subject supremely rendered but a testimony to the unerring fineness of the photographer’s eye; an eye unlike the painter’s, he claimed, because the painter constructed; the painter made up his image as if the canvas were a face; while the photographer sought his composition like a hunter his prey, and took it away clean, when it was found, to present in its purity, as the result of an act of vision, the sort of seeing no one else employed, what Mr. Gab called “slingshot sight.” Painting took too long, sculpture of course was worse, and encouraged thinking, permitted alterations, endured changes of mind; whereas the photographer came, saw, and shot in a Rolleiflex action, in one unified gesture like waving off a fly.

Mr. Gab knew Atget bided his time, did and redid; he knew that Edward Weston pulled images like putty into weird unnatural shapes; he knew that Walker Evans cropped like a farmer, August Sander as well, who also staged every shot with theatrical calculation; that Man Ray was like Duchamp, an incorrigible scamp; that Ansel Adams dodged and burned and renovated; that even André Kertész, who possessed, like Josef Sudek, a saintly sensibility, had more than once employed a Polaroid…well, Mr. Gab didn’t say very much about such lapses; he just threw up his hands, palms up/arms out, the way he did in the winter, salting his sidewalk, and said that it was beyond understanding that the same man who had taken, from an overlooking window, those pictures of Washington Square in a snow of fences — when? Nineteen seventy? well — in — anyway — a nearby year — it was dumbfounding that an artist of such supreme severity should have succumbed to Kodachromania and taken, it was said, as if he had embezzled them, two thousand Polaroids, sinking for a time as far as Cibachrome, but genius was a dark cave full of flickers; who knew what the darkness might disclose? who knew, his hands said, washing themselves in the air.

Mr. Gab forgave, and forgave again, but certain photographers had too many counts against them, like David Bailey, to mention an outstanding instance, because he bandaged the body exposing only the legendary wound with its unlikely whiskers, or did the worst sort of celebratory portrait — Yoko Ono, for god’s sake — or shot up the worst sort of scene — Las Vegas, can you imagine? — consorted with cover models, and had nudes blow chewing gum bubbles to match their bubbies or wear necklaces of barbed wire; then there was a hot lens like Irving Penn, who spent too much time in the studio, who worked for fashion magazines (advertising and news were also OUT), who photographed Marisa Berenson’s perfect bosom and Rudolf Nureyev’s perfect limbs because they were Berenson’s boobs or Nureyev’s calves, and did portraits of famous folk like Truman Capote on account of that fame, often in silly contrived poses such as Woody Allen gotten up as Groucho Marx (Mr. Gab vented exasperation), or did cutesy-pie pictures like that faucet Penn pretended was dripping diamonds, but almost worst, his malignant habit of pushing his subjects into corners where they’d be certain to feel uncomfortable and consequently conspire with the tormentor to adopt a look never before or after worn.

Nevertheless (for Mr. Gab was composed of contradictions too), Mr. Gab could show you (while complaining of its name) Cigarette No. 69, from a series Penn had done in ’72, or a devilish distortion from the box marked NUES which Kertész had accomplished in 1933 as another revenge against women…well, it was admittedly beautiful, simply so, so simply blessed…he might mention the gracefully elongated hands pressed between the thighs, or draw attention to the dark button indenting the belly as if it were waiting to ring up a roomer on the fourth floor, the soft — oh yes — mound, also expanded into a delicious swath of…Mr. Gab’s stupid assistant would have to say the word “pubic”…hair, a romantic image, really, in whose honor Mr. Gab’s hands shook when he held the photo, because he’d feel himself caught for a moment in the crease of an old heartbreak (that’s what an observer might presume), memories extended elastically through time until, with a snap, they flew out of thought like a pursued bird.

The customers…well, they were mostly not even browsers, but wanderers, or refugees from a bad patch of weather, or misinformed, even so far as to be crestfallen when they understood the Nowhere they had come to, but occasionally there’d be some otherwise oblivious fellow who would fly to a box, shove off the bag of beans, and begin to finger through the photos as you might hunt through a file, with a haste hope might have further hastened, an air of expectancy that suggested some prior prompting, only to stop and withdraw a sheet suddenly and accompany it to the light of the good lamp in the rear, where he’d begin to examine it first with a studied casualness that seemed more conspiratorial than anything, looking about like a fly about to light before indifferently glancing at the print, until at last, now as intent as a tack, he’d submit to scrutiny each inch with tight white lips, finally following Mr. Gab, who had anticipated the move, through the rug to the card table and the cat in the kitchen, where they’d have what Mr. Gab called, with a pale smile that was nearly not there, a confab.

Concerning cost. This is what his stupid assistant assumed. The meeting would usually end with a sale, a sale that put Mr. Gab in possession of an envelope fat with cash, for he accepted nothing else, nor were his true customers surprised, since they came prepared with a coat in whose inside pocket the fat envelope would be stashed. Consequently, it was a good thing the shop was so modest, the neighborhood so banal and grubby, the street, in fact, macadam to a fault, resembling Atget’s avenues or stony lanes not a whit, not by a quick flip of light from a puddle or a flop of shade from an overhang, because the shop’s stock was indeed valuable, and somewhere there was concealed cash with which, his stupid assistant surmised, Mr. Gab purchased further contraband, plus, if funds had been apportioned, a spot where lurked the money that tided Mr. Gab, his business, and his stupid assistant over from one week to the next (though their wants were modest) until, among the three who stepped inside at different times on an April day, a shifty third would paw through the box marked PRAGUE as if a treasure had been buried there, and then, despite nervous eyes and a tasteless cream-colored spring coat where — yes — the cash had been carried, buy a Josef Sudek that depicted Hradčany Castle circa 1915 under a glowering sky.

Mr. Gab really didn’t want to let go of anything. His pleasure in a photograph, his need for it to sustain his sinking spirit, rose as the print was withdrawn and examined, and neared infatuation, approached necessity, as he and the customer, photo in front of them, haggled over the price. So Mr. Gab drove a hard bargain without trying to be greedy, though that was the impression he gave. Still, he had to let some of his prizes go if he was going to continue to protect his stock and ensure his collection’s continued appreciation and applause.

Yes…yes…yes…the audience was small, but its appreciation was deep and vast, and its applause loud and almost everlasting.

Occasionally, as the assistant remembered, there were some close calls. A tall aristocratic-looking gentleman in expensive clothes and a light touch of gray hair chose a late afternoon to enter. Greeted by Mr. Gab in the usual way, he brusquely responded: I understand you have a photograph by Josef Sudek depicting two wet leaves. After a silence filled with surprise and apprehension, Mr. Gab replied with a question: who had informed the gentleman of that fact? He, by the way, he went on, was the owner of the shop; Mr. Gab was his name, while his visitor was…? It is common knowledge in certain places, Mr. Gab, if it is indeed you, the tall man answered, and consequently has no more distinct location than a breeze. For some moments, Mr. Gab was unsure which of his two questions had been addressed. I shall, the stranger went on, show you my card directly I have seen the Sudek. Two Wet Leaves, he repeated. What period would that be, Mr. Gab said, somewhat lame in his delay. Though it was his stupid assistant who limped. And who did so now — limped forward in an aisle while Mr. Gab was making preparations to reply. His stupid assistant: smiling, winking one bad eye. His naturally crooked mouth turned his smile into a smirk. Later, Mr. Gab would gratefully acknowledge his assistant’s attempt to Quasimodo the threatening fellow into an uneasy retreat.

But the man pushed forward on his own hook, looking sterner than a sentencing judge. You’d know, he said. You’ve got a print. Two Wet Leaves. Archival quality, I’m told. Nineteen thirty-two. You’d know. Then casting an eye as severe as a spinster’s at the layout of the shop, he added: where shall I find it? (waving a commanding hand) where is it hid? The provenance of my photographs, Mr. Gab replied with nervous yet offended heat, is clear beyond question, their genuineness is past dispute; their quality unquestioned and unthreatened.

As if Mr. Gab’s ire had melted the mister’s snowy glare, he made as if to communicate a smile. The assistant tried various slithery faces on and did appear to be quite stupid indeed. I should think every photograph in this place was in dire straits, sir, the man said sternly, ignoring the reassurance of his own signal. As I remember, Mr. Gab managed, Two Wet Leaves is quite impressive. You’d know, the man insisted, beginning a patrol of aisle one, his head bent to read the labels of the boxes. I had such a print once in my possession, obtained from Anna Fárová herself, Mr. Gab admitted. Soooo…the stranger straightened and turned to confront Mr. Gab. And was it taken by sly means from Anne d’Harnoncourt’s exhibit at the Philadelphia? Only from Anna’s hand, herself, sir, Mr. Gab replied, now firm and fierce, and no other Fárová than Fárová. As if there were many, the man said frowning, you would know.

Why not an Irving Penn? This insult was not lost on their visitor whose upper lip appeared to have recently missed a mustache. The many boxes seemed to daunt him, and it was now obvious that Mr. Gab would not be helpful. I have friends in Philadelphia, he said in a threatening tone. I understand the nearby gardens are nice, Mr. Gab rejoined. It was clear to the entire shop (and that included the china cat) that Mr. Gab had regained his courage. Was this freshly shaven man perhaps an officer of the law, the stupid assistant wondered, coughing now behind a stubby hand whose thumbnail was missing as David Smith’s was in that portrait by Penn, the one in which Smith’s mouth, fat-lipped and amply furred, is sucking on a pipe.

It was necessary to sidle if you wished to approach the wall, and sidle the tall man did, closing in on an image dangling there, gray in its greasy container. Is that, by god, a Koudelka, a Koudelka to be sure. His hands rose toward it. Not for sale, Mr. Gab said. Not for money. No need to remove it. But the deed was done. Slender fingers from a fine cuff parted the clip and slid the photo forth, balancing it under a blast of can light upon a delicate teeter of fingertips. Not for money? Then in trade, the man said, gazing at its darkly blanketed horse, and at the hunkered man apparently speaking to the horse’s attentive head. Ah, what magical music, the man exclaimed, as if to himself. The grays…in the horse, the street, the wall…the tracks of light, the swirls and streaks of gray…melodious as nothing can be. Unless it was Sudek himself, said Mr. Gab. The man’s lengthy head rose from the picture where it had been feeding. Yes, he said, having taken thought. Only Sudek himself.

The fingernails are especially…Mr. Gab began, because he couldn’t help himself. Ah, and the white above that one hoof, the visitor responded, entranced. Yes, the nails, the gesture of the hand, a confused puff of tail and that wall…such a wall. Hoofprints, Mr. Gab prompted. Dark soft spots…yes…and so…would you consider a trade, the man asked smiling — fully, genuinely — as he laid the cellophane envelope carefully on top of a cardboard box and allowed the print to float down upon it. I might have in my possession — if you have too many, you would know — a Sudek myself I’d be prepared to swap. I couldn’t part — Mr. Gab broke off to repeat himself. Not for trade or sale, though, if the Sudek were fine enough, he, Mr. Gab, might be prepared to purchase…But were you to see the Sudek, the man said, pointing toward his eyes…

It’s a trap, Mr. Gab’s assistant thought, for he only looked a bit stupid, especially with a little dab of spit moistening the open corner of his mouth. It is the immersement, the immersement of the figures in their fore- and back- and floor ground, that is so amazing, don’t you agree? Mr. Gab, unsure, nodded. He’s an entrapper, the assistant thought. I should show you the Sudek, the visitor said, no longer a customer but now a salesman. It sings, sir, sings. I’m willing to look at anything Sudek, Mr. Gab said, over his assistant’s unvoiced series of “no”s. All right, the seller said, slipping his tall frame toward them. After reading Mr. Gab’s expression, the man left abruptly, without leaving a clue to his intentions, and without closing the door behind him.

2 THE STUPID ASSISTANT

Had appeared at Mr. Gab’s shop door years ago with a note from the orphanage…okay…from a welfare agency. The note was in fact in a sealed envelope, and the boy, who was at that time about ten or twelve, and wasn’t yet Mr. Gab’s assistant, hadn’t an inkling of its contents. Nor did he care much. He was not then a very caring child. He had seen too many empty rooms filled with kids of a similar disownership of themselves as his. Mr. Gab looked at the envelope handed him and shook his head warily as if he could read through cream. He then conferred upon the child a similar gesture, as if he saw through him too — clear to his mean streak. Here at last, hey! he said. The kid had a pudgy bloataboy body. Half of him, the right half, though undersized, seemed okay; the leftover half, however, had been severely shortchanged. The head sloped more steeply than heads should, a shoulder sank, an arm was stunted, its squat hand had somewhere lost a finger, and the leg was missing most of its length. The child had consequently a kind of permanent lean which a thick woodsoled shoe did little to correct, though the fellow tried to compensate by pushing off with his short leg, and thereby tipping himself up to proper verticality. The result was that he bobbed about as though fish were biting, nibbling at bait hung deeply beneath whatever he was walking on — a sidewalk, lawn, shop floor, cindered ground.

The boy knew that he was being handed over. The lady with him had explained matters, then explained them again, and made silly claims that didn’t fit what little he knew of his own cloudy history. This grouchy stranger, he was told, had been his mother’s husband, but was not known to be his father. The identity of his father remained a mystery. The child’s mother had not done a Dickens on him and died of childbedding, but had come down unto death with influenza when he was allegedly a month or two past the curse of his birth. Cared for by the state from then on. He went from wet nurse to children’s home to foster parents back to children’s home again. No one liked him. He was too ugly.

He appeared to be stupid, and most of what he did was awkward, to say the least. In close quarters he tended to carom. He learned that when you failed to understand something you were blamed for that, but that alone, thus escaping consequences. People would say: well, he didn’t know any better; he’s not all there. Mr. Gab called him “you stupid kid” from the very beginning, and never called him anything else, though he lived with Mr. Gab above the first shop (on the street of his envious enemy) like one of the family if there’d been a family, and in time ceased resenting the name, which was often sweetly drawled — hey-u-stew-pid — and eventually shortened to u-Stu, a result that u-Stu quite liked, though Mr. Gab pointed out that now his name was as out of kilter as u-Stu’s stature and his gait.

In point of fact, there was really nothing the matter with his mind which had somehow scuttled to the right side of his brain when his deformities were being assembled, so when his head got lopped a little on the left, his intelligence remained intact, hiding safely a bit behind and a bit above his bright right eye, and looking out of it with the force of two whole hemispheres.

For his entire life, not omitting now, Mr. Gab’s assistant had watched gazes turn aside, watched notice be withdrawn, watched courses alter in order to avoid the embarrassments of his body: the bob and weave of it, its stunted members, the missing finger, the droopy eye, the little irreducible slobber that robbed his mouth of dignity, and the vacancy of a look that lacked muscle; who wanted to encounter them? face nature’s mistake? pretend you were talking to a normal citizen instead of a mid-sized dope-dwarf? Kids his own age were curious, of course, and would stare holes in his shirt. Neither being ignored nor peered at were tolerable states.

U-Stu’s speech had a slight slur to it on account of some crookedness at the left corner of his mouth and a bit of permanently fat lip in the same place. Simpleminded, most thought him, if they listened at all. He’d talk anyway. Ultimately he took pleasure in producing discomfiture and awkwardness, embarrassment and shame. It suited Mr. Gab to keep him around for the same reason. And he liked the name “Stu” because he felt himself to be a loose assemblage of parts that commingled in his consciousness like diced carrots and chunks of meat in juice. A few, like Boombox, the Russian furrier, would address him directly, but blarefully, so they still wouldn’t see him through the dust-up of their own noise. After all, such folk had business with his master, as the assistant was sure they thought Mr. Gab was. He, on the other hand, was ugh! He was Igor. Who deals in eyes of newts. And brains of bats. Stirs into pots the kidneys of cats.

At first the silence was stifling, Mr. Gab’s directions terse, his look stony; and his assistant was certain that this indifference was an act to cover revulsion; but after a while Mr. Gab began to see u-Stu’s crooked mouth, saw the little bubbles of spit, heard the slur, grew accustomed to the rockabyebounce, and accepted u-Stew’s absent finger as well as the nail that was never there, not hammered off as had been, u-Stu believed, David Smith’s. Then, after further familiarity was achieved, the assistant became invisible again, the way one’s wife fades, or actual son recedes, seen without being seen, heard without hearing, felt without caring, even, when it was the wife, for her plump breast. This was okay in most minds because it was based upon acceptance. Like getting used to handling worms or disemboweling birds. Yet it wasn’t okay to the assistant because the assistant felt he was in fact disgusting — quite — so that if you were to truly take him in you should continue to feel revulsion too: he hadn’t been brought into the world merely to wobble, but to repel people by these means, and at the same time to remind them of their luck in having sailed all — not just portions — of themselves down the birth canal.

The first shop, though it had a finer front, had been much smaller, and the assistant, while yet too young to be much help, had to assist in sleeping, since Mr. Gab talked in his sleep, and snored like a roaring lion, and turned and tossed like a wave, and occasionally punched the air as if he were a boxer in training, so the boy had to shake Mr. Gab awake sometimes, or lie in the dark nearby, listen to his mumbles, and participate in the nightmares, which was one reason why the assistant said, in his own undertone, he has the gift, Gab has, the gift. The boy asked Mr. Gab if he had enemies he was defeating when he poked his pillow or flailed away at the night air, and this question helped Mr. Gab realize that their present sleeping arrangement wasn’t salubrious. After some finagling, he found the space where they did their little business now, and there they established themselves, after making several trips (it was but a few blocks) to trundle cartons of prints on a handcart when it wasn’t raining and if the coast was clear.

After the move, he slept in a sleeping bag at the back of the second store, at the border of Mr. Gab’s quarters but not over the line, where a dog might have lain had they had one — art and dogs don’t mix, Mr. Gab said (Mr. Gab squeezed his nose with a set of fingers whenever Mr. Wegman’s name was mentioned), and the best kind of cat is ceramic. I shall be your guard ghoul, the assistant said, a remark which Mr. Gab didn’t find funny, though he rarely laughed at anything; occasionally upon seeing a photo he would hoot; however u-Stu wasn’t sure whether his hoot was one of amusement or merely derisory, so perhaps he was never amused, though he from time to time made such a noise.

U-Stu had facial hair on half of his face, and Mr. Gab, to u-Stu’s surprise, would shave him. Half a beard is not better than none, he said. Because he believed for a long time that his assistant was too stupid to shave himself, certainly too stupid to live alone, take care of himself in any ordinary way, he shaved his adolescent; initially even cut the boy’s meat; carefully combed his ungainly hair; pressed his few clothes with an iron he had heated on the stove; and tried to cook things that were easy to eat. Gradually, Mr. Gab realized that although his stupid assistant chewed crookedly, his chew was nevertheless quite effective, and despite the fact that the boy was short-armed (Mr. Gab always winced at this formulation), he could manage a knife and fork (he needed to lower one shoulder to pull his short arm to the front), and with his one good eye working overtime (as Mr. Gab probably thought), he could read, shave, look at pictures, and, with a control over his body that grew better and better, he could perform his characteristic bob-and-wobble much more smoothly. U-Stu soon learned to repair fixtures, sweep the store, replace photographs in their plastic sleeves, and return them properly to their cardboard files. Oh, yes…and ask visitors: muh I hulp you, shur?

Mr. Gab began by speaking to the boy (he had not yet received his promotion to stupid assistant) slowly, and a little loudly, as though the boy might be a bit deaf in addition, talking to him often, contrary to his habitual silence, plainly believing that such treatment was necessary for the lad’s mental health, which it no doubt was, although no number of words could make him into a lad, because lads were always strapping. This loquacity, night and day it seemed, led the boy to believe that Mr. Gab gabbed, was a gabber by nature, so he would say to himself, almost audibly, he has the gift, he does, does Gab, as he went about his work which was each week more and more advanced in difficulty. He could see Mr. Gab’s face wrestling with the question: what shall I say today — good heavens — and on what subject? Mr. Gab’s slow considered ramblings were to be the boy’s schooling. Perhaps, today, he’d want to learn about bikes. I want to know about my mother, the boy asked. Mr. Gab began to answer, almost easily, taken by surprise: she resembled one of Stieglitz’s portraits of O’Keeffe. She was beautiful beyond the bearing of one’s eyes. Such hands. Stieglitz always photographed her hands. Her hands. As if he had awakened, Mr. Gab broke off in great embarrassment, his face flushed and its expression soon shunted to a sidetrack.

Before that blunder — I want to know about my mother — Mr. Gab had spoken to the boy of many things. He always spoke as if chewing slowly, in the greatest seriousness, early on about school and how he, Mr. Gab, had struggled through classes here after his family had come to the States, having an unpronounceable name, and not knowing the language; about his sisters and aunts, mothers and grans, never of men, because men, he said, scorned him for his interests, and broke his Brownie; he talked about the time when he had begun work in a drugstore, learning from books how to develop his prints; about, after he had gotten canned for stealing chemicals, the days he had sold door to door — brushes, pots and pans — enduring the embarrassments of repeated rejection, once even attacked, his face mopped by his own mop by an irate customer (the sunny side of things was left dark); until, eventually, having marched through many of the miseries of his life (though leaving serious gaps, even his auditor was aware of that), the subject he chose to address was more and more often the photograph, its grays and its glories.

Beneath — are u listening, u-stew-pid-u? — beneath the colored world, like the hidden workings of the body, where the bones move, where the nerves signal, where the veins send the blood flooding — where the signaling nerves especially form their net — lie all the grays, the grays that go from the pale gray of bleached linen, through all the shades of darkening, deepening graying grays that lie between, to the grays that are nearly soot black, without light: the gray beneath blue, the gray beneath green, yes, I should also say the gray beneath gray; and these grays are held in that gray continuum between gray extremes like books between bookends. U-Stu, pay attention, this is the real world, the gray gradation world, and the camera, the way an X-ray works, reveals it to our eye, for otherwise we’d have never seen it; we’d have never known it was there, under everything, beauty’s real face beneath the powders and the rouges and the crèmes. Color is cosmetic. Good for hothouse blooms. Great for cards of greeting. Listen, u-Stew, color is consternation. Color is a lure. Color is candy. It makes sensuality easy. It leads us astray. Color is oratory in the service of the wrong religion. Color makes the camera into a paintbrush. Color is camouflage. That was Mr. Gab’s catechism: what color was. Color was not what we see with the mind. Like an overpowering perfume, color was vulgar. Like an overpowering perfume, color lulled and dulled the senses. Like an overpowering perfume, color was only worn by whores.

Grass cannot be captured in color. It becomes confused. Trees neither. Except for fall foliage seen from a plane. But in gray: the snowy rooftop, the winter tree, whole mountains of rock, the froth of a fast stream can be caught, spew and striation, twig and stick, footprint on a snowy walk, the wander of a wrinkle across the face…oh…and Mr. Gab would interrupt his rhapsody to go to a cabinet and take out one of Sudek’s panoramic prints: see how the fence comes toward the camera, as eager as a puppy, and how the reflection of the building in the river, in doubling the image, creates a new one, born of both body and soul, and how the reflection of the dome of the central building on the other side of the water has been placed at precisely the fence’s closest approach, and how, far away, the castle, in a gray made of mist, layers the space, and melts into a sky that’s thirty shades of gradual…see that? see how? How the upsidedown world is darker, naturally more fluid…ah…and breaking off again, Mr. Gab withdrew from a cardboard carton called PRAGUE a photograph so lovely that even the stupid not-yet assistant drew in his breath as though struck in the stomach (though he’d been poked in the eye); and Mr. Gab observed this and said ah! you do see, you do…well…bless you. The stupid not-yet assistant was at that moment so happy he trembled at the edge of a tear.

Hyde Park Corner. This picture, let’s pretend, is one of the Park speakers, Mr. Gab said, pointing at a hanger. What does it tell us? Ah, the haranguers, they stand there, gather small crowds, and declaim about good and evil. They promise salvation to their true believers. Mr. Gab went to the wall and took down his Alvin Langdon Coburn. Held it out for u-Stu’s inspection like a tray of cookies or anything not likely to remain in one place for long. There’s a dark circle protecting the tree and allowing its roots to breathe. And the dark trunk, too, rising to enter its leaves. In a misted distance — see? — a horse-drawn bus, looking like a stagecoach, labeled A1, with its driver and several passengers. In short: we see this part of the world immersed in this part of the world’s weather. But we also see someone seeing it, someone having a feeling about the scene, not merely in a private mood, but responding to just this…this…and taking in the two trees and the streetlamp’s standard, the carriage, and in particular the faint diagonals of the curb, these sweet formal relations, each submerged in a gray-white realm that’s at the same time someone’s — Alvin Langdon Coburn’s — head. And the photo tells us there are no lines in nature. Edge blends with edge until edgelessness is obtained. The spokes of the wheels are little streaks of darker air into which the white horse is about to proceed. But, my boy, Alvin Langdon Coburn’s head is not now his head, not while we see what he is seeing, for he is at this moment a stand-in for God. A god who is saying: let there be this sacred light.

Mr. Gab would lower his nose as if sniffing up odors from the image. If the great gray world holds sway beneath the garish commerce of color, so the perception of its beauty hides from the ordinary eye, for what does the ordinary eye do but ignore nearly everything it sees, seeking its own weak satisfactions?

Such shadows as are here, for instance, in these photographs, are not illusions to be simply sniffed at. Where are the real illusions, u-Stu? They dwell in the eyes and hearts and minds of those in the carriage — yes — greedy to be going to their girl, to their bank, to their business. Do they observe the street as a gray stream — no — they are off to play Monopoly. Scorn overcame Mr. Gab, whose voice sounded hoarse. They have mayhem on their minds.

Finally, Mr. Gab had got round to the War. Mr. Gab’s tour of duty — he was a corporal of supply — took him to Europe. In London he learned about the Bostonian Coburn. In Paris, he discovered Atget. In Berlin, he ran into Sander. In Prague…in Prague…Mr. Gab was mustered out in Europe and spent a vaguely substantial number of years in the continent’s major cities. More, Mr. Gab did not divulge; but he did speak at length of Italy’s glories, of Spain’s too, of Paris and Prague…He took u-Stu on slow walks across the Charles Bridge, describing the statuary that lined it, elegizing the decaying, dusty, untouched city, mounting the endless flight of steps to the Hradčany Castle, taking in both the Černín and the Royal Gardens. They strolled the Malá Strana, the Smetana Quai, as well as those renamed for Janáček and Masaryk, had coffee in Wenceslas Square, visited St. Vitus Cathedral, and eventually crossed the Moldau bridges one word after another, each serving for two: a meaning in memory, an image in imagination.

When Mr. Gab returned to the States, he enrolled in New York’s City College on the GI Bill, while working, to make ends meet, serially at several photography shops and even serving, during a difficult period, as a guard in a gallery. But now the gaps in this history of his grew ever greater, became more noticeable than before; details, which had been pointlessly plentiful about Prague buildings and Italian traffic, disappeared into vague generalities like figures in a Sudek or a Coburn fog, and most questions, when rarely asked, were curtly rebuffed.

But Mr. Gab did regale his pupil with an account of his trip in a rented truck to their present city, and u-Stu was given to understand, though the story did not dwell on cargo or luggage, that his cartons came with him, and, in Johnstown, of all places, were threatened by a downpour which forced him for a time to heave to and wait the water out, so sudden and severe it was, and how nervous he had become watching the Conemaugh River rise. The journey had all the qualities of uprootedness and flight, especially since Mr. Gab’s account did suggest that he’d left New York with his college education incomplete, and a bitterness about everything academic, about study and teaching and scholarship, which only hinted at why he had abandoned his archival enterprise.

For in Europe, surrounded at first by fierce fighting, bombs made of blood and destruction, Mr. Gab had formed the intention of saving reality from its own demise by collecting and caring for the world in photographic form. There were footsteps he was following, or so he found out. Like Alvin Langdon Coburn he had been given a camera by an uncle. Like Alvin Langdon Coburn, he had crossed the sea to London. Like Coburn, he would tour Europe, though not with his mother, who was as missing from his life, he insisted, as that of u-Stu. In the footsteps of Mr. Coburn, possibly, but not in the same shoes, for he, Mr. Gab, hadn’t had a father who made shirts, and died leaving his mother money. He hadn’t found friends like Stieglitz and Steichen with whom he could converse, or exchange warm admirations. He sat in metal storerooms surrounded by supplies, and learned a few things about stocks and stores and shipment.

Unlike Johnstown’s fabled inundation, but rather drip by drip, words entered Stu’s ear, and filled his mind to flood stage finally; not that he needed to be instructed about the grimness of the world, or about what passed for human relations. Some of the words weren’t nice ones. Mr. Gab kept his tongue clean, but now and then a word like “whore” would slip out. You will not know that word I just used, Mr. Gab said hopefully. Stu thought he meant the word “catechism” which indeed he didn’t understand, but Mr. Gab meant “whore,” which he proceeded to define as anyone who accepts money in return for giving pleasure…pleasures that were mostly illusory. There were shysters for misma-nipulating the law. There were charlatans for the manufacture of falsehood. Quacks for promising health. Sharks for making illegal loans. Mountebanks to prey upon the foolishly greedy. Apparently, humanity was made of little else.

But there were, Mr. Gab assured u-Stu, the Saviors too. They bore witness. They documented. Eugène Atget had rescued Paris. Josef Sudek had done the same for Prague. August Sander had catalogued the workers of his country, as Salgado has tried to do for workers worldwide. Karl Blossfeldt, like Audubon, had preserved the wild plants. Bellocq had treated his Orleans whores with dignity. And how about Evelyn Cameron, who had saved Montana with her single shutter? Or Russell Lee, who photographed the Great Flood of ’37 as well as the Negro slums of Chicago? Or consider the work of a studio like that of Southworth & Hawes, whose images of Niagara Falls were among the more amazing ever made. He, Mr. Gab, had but one of their daguerreotypes. And Mr. Gab then disappeared into his room behind the rug to produce in a moment a group portrait taken in the Southworth & Hawes studio of the girls of Boston’s Emerson School, and through the envelope, which Mr. Gab did not remove, u-Stu saw the identically and centrally parted hair of thirty-one girls and the white lace collars of twenty-eight.

Mr. Gab went on to extol the work of Martín Chambi whom he had available only in a catalogue produced for an exhibit at the Smithsonian (so there were an unknown number of books behind the rug, perhaps in that closet, perhaps in a shelf above the boxes). Although Mr. Gab was capable of staring at a photograph uninterruptedly for many minutes, he had the annoying habit of flipping rapidly through books — dizzying u-Stu’s good eye, which could only receive the briefest tantalizations of an apparently magical place, set among the most remote mountains, Mr. Gab called “Macchoo Peechoo”—until he reached the photo he was searching for. There, there, Mr. Gab said, pointing: a young man in a most proper black suit and bow tie was standing beside a giant of a man clad in tatters, a cloth hat like an aviator’s helmet in the giant’s hand, a serape draped over the giant’s shoulders — and — and around the small man’s, a huge arm finished by fingers in the form of a great claw. The little fellow is the photographer’s assistant, Mr. Gab informed his. Who, u-Stu saw, was gazing up at the face of the giant with respectful incomprehension. But one was mostly drawn to the giant’s patched and tattered shirt and baggy trousers, to the barely thonged feet that had borne much, and finally to the huge stolid countenance, formed from endurance. Shots of shirts were rare.

Not all of Mr. Gab’s enthusiasms were trotted out at once. They were instead produced at intervals involving months, but each was offered as if no finer effort, no better example, could be imagined. Yet u-Stu came to believe that the artist Mr. Gab called P.H. (Ralph Waldo was the other Emerson) was dearest to him, after one afternoon being shown (again from the cache in the kitchen) a simple country and seaside scene: a crude sailboat manned by three, and oared as well, under way upon a marshy watercourse, the rowboat’s big sail, with its soft vertical curves and pale patches, in the center of the photograph, and to the left where the reeds began, though at the distance where there had to be land, a simple farmhouse resting in a clump of low trees, a trail of chimney smoke the sole sign of occupancy.

Every photograph by its very nature is frozen in its moment, Mr. Gab said, but not every photograph portrays stillness as this one does. The sail is taut, smoke is streaming away toward the margins of the picture’s world, and the postures of the oarsmen suggest they are at work; but there is little wake, the surface of the water is scarcely ruffled, not a reed is bent, the trees are without leaves, and the faint form of a small windmill shows the four blades to be unmoving. Nevertheless, it is the lucency of the low light, the line of the sail’s spar, which meets on one side a shoreline, on the other a small inlet-edging fence, which holds the image still; it is the way the mast runs on into its reflection, and the long low haze stretched across the entire background at the point where earth and air blend, where the soft slightly clouded sky rises; it is the relation of all these dear tones to one another that creates a serenity which seeks the sublime, because it is so complete. Complete, u-Stu, complete.

Look. In this work, the house, the boat, the rowing men have no more weight than the boat’s small shadow on the pale white water, or the bare trees and stiff reeds, because all are simply there together. Equals added to equals yields equals. One can speak one’s self insensible about the salubrious and necessary unity of humankind with nature, u-Stu-u, yet rarely enable your listener to see how the solitude, the independent being, of every actual thing is celebrated by the community created through such a composition. The light, coming from the right, illuminates the sides of the house in such a way it seems blocky and dimensional, as the boat does; however the sail, the sky, the water, and their realms, though made of a register of curves, are otherwise, and flat as a drawn shade.

At exam time, Mr. Gab would cry out: what have I been saying? What have I said? Every player is made a star when the team succeeds as a team, Stu promptly answered, whereupon Gab lost his mister and his temper at the same time, complaining of the comparison, and refusing (as he regularly did after exams) to speak to his help, who had been relegated a rank.

In this bumpy way his education proceeded, but it had an odd consequence. Stu’s experience was made by someone else’s words; his memory, formerly poor, was reluctant to linger on an early life that had been a bitter bit of bad business; so he adopted another person’s past, and he saw what that other person said he’d seen. He kept house in another’s household, and adopted points of view he never properly arrived at. Who could blame him? Would not each of us have done the same? Why not change residences when the skin that confined you was a bitter bit of bad business?

His fingers licked him through the pages of Mr. Gab’s dozen or so books of photography, mostly limited to Mr. Gab’s narrow enthusiasms; however there was a recent Salgado which rendered the stupid assistant weak in one knee, though he’d been told messages were for Western Union not for artistry. Such marvelous messages though — these Salgados proved to be.

Stu started stepping out — a phrase to be used advisedly. He obtained a card at the local library, shoplifted a few fruits, and sat in sun-filled vacant lots, deep in the weeds, happy with the heavy air. In the library he began examining the work of the two painters Mr. Gab admitted to his pantheon: Canaletto and Vermeer. In the shops he slyly added to his meager stock by stealing small fruits: figs, limes, kiwis, cherries, berries. In the weeds, feasting on his loot, Stu would imagine he lived in an alternative world, and he’d scale everything around him down, pretend he was hunkered in a photograph, where woods were black and white and pocket-sized. In the library he was eyed with suspicion, and Stu felt certain that only the librarians’ fear of a lawsuit let them lend what they did lend to him. In the open-air market, they knew he was a thief past all convicting, yet they hadn’t caught him yet, it was a public space, and they begged for the crowds that concealed his snitches with distracting blouses and billowy shirts. Shirts ought to receive some celebration. But he was soon run out of his weedy lot by a puritanical cop.

It was about then that Mr. Gab expelled Stu from his sleeping post, and he formally became Mr. Gab’s assistant. Mr. Gab had never paid his assistant a wage, not a dime, nor had he bought him anything but secondhands; even the comb he let Stu have had been run through many an unknown head of hair. Mr. Gab was frugal, probably because he had to be, so their diet was repeatedly rice and beans. He moved his assistant into public space and a rooming house run formerly by Chinese, or so the Chinese who ran it now maintained. It had brown paper walls, a cot and a chair, a john down the hall, a window without a blind, a throw rug which — to expose a splintery floor — would wad itself into a wad while you watched. You can keep this job if you want it, Mr. Gab announced, and I’ll pay you the minimum, but now you must take your meals and your sleep and your preferences out of here — out — and manage them yourself.

At first the new assistant was wholly dismayed. What had he done, he finally asked. You’ve grown up, was Mr. Gab’s unhelpful answer. You go away, god knows where, and look at god knows what, color and comic and bosom books. Actually, it was as if Mr. Gab were clairvoyant and knew that his assistant had come on a book by Ernst Haas called Color Photography in the same local library where he had obtained his volume of Vermeer, and been subsequently ravished, just as Mr. Gab feared. But if Vermeer was photographic, Haas was painterly. Stu was sure Mr. Gab would say, very pretty, very nice, nevertheless not reliable. The object is lost, can you find it? torn posters and trash — that’s the world? and how far into a flower can you fall without sneezing?

Reality is made of nouns not adjectives, Gab shouted at the wall where his nouns sat in their sacred gray desuetude.

The stupid assistant suspected that Gab had listened to what was going on in his stupid assistant’s head, and heard objections and reservations and hesitations and challenging questions, both personal and educational, particular and theoretic. Then said to himself: this Stu should go elsewhere with these thoughts. Ernst Haas had photographed some flowers through a screen, making romantic a symbol of romance; through an open oval in a dark room, like the inside of a camera, he had rendered a bright café scene so its reality seemed an illustration in a magazine; he’d snapped a cemetery bust at night as if the head had leached the film and raised a ghost; and Mr. Gab would certainly have denounced these startling images as mere monkey business, had he seen them: the cropped stained glass from Cluny, too, glass heads looking like stone ones in a dismal darkness, a regiment of roofs in Reading, the silhouettes of fishermen fishing in a line along the Seine; but the assistant could remember now, Sudek’s magical garden pictures, with their multiple exposures, dramatic angles, and cannily positioned sculptures, and he found himself thinking that it wasn’t fair, it wasn’t fair to be so puritanical, to live with a passel of prejudices, even if each enthusiasm that was denied inspection intensified the believer’s devotion.

Mr. Gab’s exiled assistant came to work just before ten each morning like a clerk or a secretary, but if mum were Mr. Gab’s one word, he would not utter it. Between them, throughout the day, a silence lay like a shawl on a shivering shoulder. In the flophouse where the assistant lived now there was plenty of jabbering, but he couldn’t bear the cacophony let alone find any sense to it. In his room the world had grown grossly small. The window framed an alley full of litter. The brown paper wall bore tears and peels and spots made by drops of who knew what — expectorations past. Yet in such stains lay lakes full of reeds and floating ducks and low loglike boats. Instead of the sort of wall which furnished a rich many-toned background for so many of Atget’s documents: instead of the cobbled courtyard that the remainder of the photo surrounded, shadowed, or stood on; instead of gleaming disks of stone with their dark encircling lines; instead of the leaves of trees in a flutter about a field of figures; there might be — instead — a single pock, the bottom of it whitish with plaster: that’s what he had to look at, descend into, dream about, not a rhyming slope of rock, its layers threaded and inked; not the veins of a single leaf like roads on a map, or a tear of paper resembling a tantrum — his rips didn’t even resemble rips — or faded petals that have fallen like a scatter of gravel at the foot of a vase; not an errant flash of light centered and set like a jewel: instead he had a crack, just a crack in a window, a cob’s web, or that of a spider, dewdrop clinging like an injured climber to its only rope of escape; not a clay flowerpot given the attention due a landscape; not a scratch on the hood of some vehicle, not directional signs painted on the pavement, instructions worn by the wheels of countless cars; not a black eye enlarged to resemble the purple of a blown rose. These were the images in his borrowed books, the material of his mind’s eye, the Lilliputian world grown taller than that tattered Peruvian giant.

Even Mr. Gab’s heroes, even Josef Koudelka, had devoted at least one frame, one moment of his art, to a slice of cheese, bite of chocolate, cut of fruit that had been strewn upon the rumpled front page of the International Herald Tribune to serve as a still life’s prey — a spoiled fish — a party of empty bottles. That’s okay, he heard Mr. Gab say, because such a shot records a lunch, a day, a time in the world. I want that, u-Stew-u, I want the world, I don’t want to see through the picture to the world, the picture is not a porthole. I want the world in—you see—in—the photo. What a world it is after all! Am I a fool? Not to know what the world is; what it comes to? It is misery begetting misery, you bet; it’s meanness making meanness, sure; it’s calamity; it’s cruelty and greed and indifference; I know what it is, you know what it is, we know how it is, if not why — yet I want the world as it is rescued by the camera and redeemed. U-Stu-u. Paris is…was…noisy, full of Frenchmen, full of pain, full of waste, of ordinaire; but Atget’s Paris, Sudek’s Vienna, Coburn’s London, even Bellocq’s poor whores (I never showed you those ladies, you found out and stared at that filth yourself), Salgado’s exploited, emaciated workers are lifted up and given grace when touched by such lenses; and every injustice that the world has done to the world is forgiven — in the photograph — in…in…where even horse-plopped cobbles come clean.

But what about, the stupid assistant began, what about Haas’s Moreno, a photo full of steps, the dark woman walking toward a set of them, her black back to us, the red and white chickens standing on stairs…they’d all look better gray, he was sure Mr. Gab would say. Or the lane of leaves, that lane of trees beside the Po, or the Norwegian fjord photo, Mr. Gab, the faint central hill like a slow cloud in the water, what of them? what of them? So what, he replied on behalf of Mr. Gab who was somewhat cross, when one can have Steichen’s or Coburn’s streetlamps, spend an evening full of mist and mellow glisten, bite into an avenue that’s slick as freshly buttered toast.

But Mr. Gab, do you dream that Sebastião Salgado wants anyone forgiven: are the starving to be forgiven for starving? are those scenes from Dante’s hell (the hell you told me about) redeemed because the miners of Serra Pelado’s gold — worn, gaunt, covered with mud and rags — are, through his art, delivered from their servitude and given to Dante? am I to be forgiven for my deformities? my rocking, as if I were indeed the baby in the tree, is it okay? If cleverly clicked? o yes, Mr. Gab, you’re right, I did peek at the fancy girls, and I was toasted by one in striped tights and a bonnet of hair who raised to me a shot glass of Raleigh Rye, but so many of them, sad to say, had scratched-out faces, only their bare bodies were allowed to be; while Bellocq too, by the book, was said to be misshapen…not quite like me; but he didn’t dwarf himself, I bet, and behaved himself with the girls because he understood his burden; just as it’s true, I didn’t do me, someone else, perhaps yourself, Mr. Gab, did, but I was not a party to the filthy act that made me, or to the horror of having insufficient room in an unsuitable womb; I didn’t mangle myself, suck the nail from my own thumbs, shorten my stature, wound my mouth; yet daily I inflict them on others; I wobble along on my sidewalk and all those passerby-eyes flee the scene like shoo’d flies.

Should Salgado — u-Stu-u — Mr. Gab rejoins, should he then forget his skills and just picture pain picture human evil picture human greed picture desolation picture people other people have allowed to become battered trees made of nothing but barren twigs, picture many murdered, meadows murdered, hills heaved into the sea, sand on open eyes, the grim and grisly so that it approaches us the way you do on the street, so we will look away, even cross against traffic in order to avoid any encounter, because the overseers of those miners don’t care a wink about them, never let their true condition sneak under a lid, form a thought, suggest an emotion — unless there is a fainter, a sluggard, a runaway — no more than the other workers, who sweat while smelting the ore, give the miners time, since no one thinks of the smelters either, the glare oiling their bare chests, no more than those who stamp some country’s cruel insignia on the country’s coins or dolly a load of now gold bars into a vault think of anyone else but their own beers and bad bread and breeding habits.

But Mr. Gab, sir, when I look at that huge hole in the earth, and at those innumerable heads and shoulders heavy with sacks of dirt like a long line of ants on paths encircling the pit that their own work has bit into the ground, just as you and Dante said hell’s rungs do; against my will, I see something sublime, like the force of a great wind or quake or volcanic eruption.

Yes, u-Stu-u, because u have a book in hand, u aren’t in the picture, u are thousands of miles from Brazil, u wear clean underclothes (I hope and suppose), but can u now reflect on your own sad condition, as molested by fate as they’ve been, those poor workers, because who of us at the end of the day goes home happy? do you go to your room and laugh at its luxury? You saw — it’s less than the whores of New Orleans; don’t you still see trash from your window, and stains on the wall and through a pock or two if you peer into them won’t you encounter again that unearthed creature covered with a silkskin of mud, a man who a moment before the photo was in a long climbing line up the laddered side of one of hell’s excavations, and won’t you continue to find behind him, and free of misery’s place in the picture, another man in shorts and a clean shirt studying a clipboard? and what are we to think of him, then? and what are we to think of ourselves, and the little gold rings we wear when we marry?

Starve the world to amuse a few. That’s man’s motto. That sums it. But now Mr. Gab’s assistant didn’t know — couldn’t tell — who was supposed to have said it.

Alvin Langdon Coburn came up. After a day of silence, his name seemed a train of words. Alvin Langdon Coburn. As if Mr. Gab had really been talking with his assistant as his assistant had imagined. He was holding a paperback copy of Coburn’s autobiography. With a finger to mark his place, Mr. Gab gave it a brief wave. I shall read u-Stu what Alvin Langdon Coburn wrote about those who do dirty tricks with their negatives. Mr. Gab’s voice assumed a surprising falsetto. His assistant had never heard him read aloud out of a book before this moment — a moment that had therefore become important. “Now I must confess I do not approve of gum prints which look like chalk drawings…” Mr. Gab interrupted himself. P.H. was equally fierce and unforgiving, he said. “…nor of drawing on negatives, nor of glycerin-restrained platinotypes in imitation of wash-drawings as produced by…” You won’t have heard of this guy, Mr. Gab added, letting disdain into his voice like a cat into a kitchen. “…Joseph T. Keiley, a well-known…” Well known, well known — not anymore known than a silent-film star. “…American photographer and a friend of Alfred Stieglitz.” They all claimed to be that — a good, a fond friend of Stieglitz. Let’s skip. “…I do not deny that Demachy, Eugene, Keiley and others…” Heard of them, have we? Are they in the history books? are they? take a look. “…and others produced exciting prints by these manipulated techniques…” Bah bah bah-dee-bah. Here—“This I rarely did, for I am myself a devotee of pure photography, which is unapproachable in its own field.” Unapproachable, you hear? Pure. That’s the ticket. That’s the word. Unapproachable. He snapped the book shut and sank back into a silence which said something had been proved, something once for all had been decided.

3 FROM THE STOOL OF THE STUPID ASSISTANT

During the long empty hours between customers, Mr. Gab sat at his desk at the front of the shop and drowsed or thumbed through the same old stack of photographic magazines he’d had for as long as his assistant had been near enough his paging thumb to observe what the pages concerned. Most of the time Mr. Gab sat there with the immobility of a mystic. Occasionally, he’d leaf through a book, often an exhibition catalogue or a volume containing a description of the contents of a great archive, such as Rüdiger Klessmann’s book on the Kaiser Friedrich Museum, over whose pages and pictures he’d slowly shake his head. Once in a while, his back still turned to his assistant, he’d raise a beckoning hand, and u-Stu would leave his stool in the rear where he was awkwardly perched while trying to read books slender enough to be steadily held by one hand, and come forward to Mr. Gab’s side where he was always expected to verify, by studying the picture, Mr. Gab’s poor opinion of the masterpiece.

The beckoning finger would then descend to point at a portion of a painting; whereupon Mr. Gab would say: look at that! is that a tree? that tangle of twigs? The finger would poke the plate, perhaps twice. It’s an architect’s tree! His voice would register three floors of disgust. It’s a rendering, a sign for a tree; the man might as well have written “tree” there. Over here, by “barn,” see “bush.” And the fellow is said to be painting nature. (It might have been a Corot or Courbet.) See? is that a tree? is that a tree or a sign, that squiggle? I can read it’s a tree, but I don’t see a tree. It is not a tree anyone actually sees. Twigs don’t attach to branches that way; branches don’t grow from trunks that way; you call those smudges shade? To a simp they might suggest shade. To a simpleton. There’s not a whiff of cooling air.

The finger would retire long enough for the assistant to make out an image and the book would snap shut like a slammed door: I am leaving forever, the slam said. A fake crack in a fake rock from which a fake weed fakes its own growth, Mr. Gab might angrily conclude: we are supposed to admire that? (then after an appropriate pause, he’d slowly, softly add, in a tone signifying his reluctant surrender to grief) that…? that is artistry?

The assistant spent many hours every day like a dunce uncomfortably perched on a stool he had difficulty getting the seat of his pants settled on because it stood nearly as high as he did and furthermore because the assistant was trying to bring a book up with him held in his inadequate hand. Once up, he was reluctant to climb down if it meant he’d soon have to climb up again. So he perched, not perhaps for as long as Mr. Gab sat, but a significant interval on the morning’s clock: with a view of the shop and its three rows of trestle tables topped with their load of flap-closed cardboard boxes adorned by beanbags as if they were the puffy peaks of stocking caps. The tables appeared to be nearly solid blocks since so many containers were stored underneath each one where with your foot you’d have to coax a carton to slide sufficiently far into the aisle to undo its flaps and finger through its contents. ROME I.

But Mr. Gab or his stupid assistant, whoever was closest, would rise or fall and wordlessly rush or rock to the box and lift it quickly or awkwardly up on top of the ones on the table, deflapping it smartly or ineptly and folding the four lids back before returning to chair or stool and the status quo. Mr. Weasel would occasionally come in and always want a box buried beneath a table in the most remote and awkward spot; but at least he’d pick on a container up front where Mr. Gab would have to say good day in customary greeting and then push cartons about like some laborer in a warehouse to get at PARIS NIGHTLIFE or some similar delicacy that Mr. Weasel always favored.

Customers who came to the shop more than once got names chosen to reflect their manner of looking or the shapes they assumed while browsing, especially as they were observed from the stool of the stupid assistant. Weasel slunk. He was thin and short and had a head that was all nose. His eyes were dotted and his hair was dark and painted on. The first few times Weasel came to the store the stupid assistant watched him carefully because his moves produced only suspicion. After a number of visits, however, the Weasel simply became the Weasel, and the stupid assistant shut down his scrutiny, or rather, turned it onto his page.

Part of the stupid assistant’s education was to study books which Mr. Gab assigned, not that they ever discussed them, and it would have been difficult for Mr. Gab to know, ever, if his assistant was dutiful or not, or was reading filth and other kinds of popular fiction. When he thought he had caught the Weasel, u-Stu was wading through Walter Pater. And Pater held a lot of water. U-Stu was wading waist-deep. Mr. Gab had not recommended any of what the assistant later found out were Pater’s principal works, but had sent him to a collection of essays called Appreciations where u-Stu learned of Dryden’s imperfect mastery of the relative pronoun, a failing he misunderstood as familial. All Mr. Gab asked of his assistant regarding the works he assigned (beside the implicit expectation that it would be u-Stu who would withdraw them from the library, now he had his own card) was that u-Stu was expected to select a sentence he favored from some part of the text to repeat to Mr. Gab at a suitable moment; after which Mr. Gab would grunt and nod, simultaneously signifying approval and termination.

It was not clear to u-Stu whether there were designs behind Mr. Gab’s selections, but Appreciations contained essays on writers whose names were, to u-Stu, at best vaguely familiar, or on plays by Shakespeare like Measure for Measure for which slight acquaintance was also the applicable description. The first essay was called “Style” and u-Stu supposed it was Mr. Gab’s target, but, once more, the piece was larded with references that, from u-Stu, drew a blank response of recognition. U-Stu resented having his ignorance so repeatedly demonstrated. To Mr. Gab he said: “this book is dedicated to the memory of my brother William Thompson Pater who quitted a useful and happy life Sunday April 24, 1887.” Quite to the quoter’s surprise, this sentence proved to be acceptable, and u-Stu was able to return the volume a week ahead of its due date.

This is not to say that u-Stu didn’t give it a shot, and in point of fact he was in the middle of trying to understand a point about Flaubert’s literary scruples (all of Mr. Pater’s subjects seemed to be neurotic) when his head rose wearily from the page in time to see the Weasel slip a glassine envelope, clearly not their customary kind, into the stock of a cardboard box labeled MISCELLANEOUS INTERIORS. Skidding from his stool he rocked toward the Weasel at full speed. Sir, he said, sir, may I help you with anything; you seem to be a bit confused. This was a formula Mr. Gab had hit upon for lowering the level of public embarrassment whenever hanky-pankies were observed. However, as u-Stu took thought, as Mr. Gab turned to locate his assistant’s voice, and as the Weasel looked up in alarm, u-Stu realized that the Weasel, so far as he had seen, was adding to, not subtracting from the contents of the container. Had u-Stu perhaps missed an extraction? Was this the latter stage of a switch?

It’s all right, Mr. Stu, Mr. Gab said urgently. Mr. Grimes is just replacing a print for me. Oh, said Mr. Stu, stopping as soon as he could and calming his good eye. Mr. Grimes, the Weasel, winked in surprise and backed away from Mr. Stu in the direction of the door. Something is up, Mr. Stu thought, thinking he was now Mr. Stu, an improvement surely, a considerable promotion, a kind of bribe, but an acceptable one, coming as it did at long — he thought — last. But what was up? what? Mr. Stu retreated to his stool and Mr. Grimes slid out of the shop with never a further word. In fact, Mr. Stu couldn’t remember a first word. But he’d been inattentive while tending to Walter Pater’s work, and to the peevish Flaubert, who had just vowed, at the point Mr. Stu had reached in his reading, to quit writing altogether.

Mr. Gab’s back was soon bent over MISCELLANEOUS INTERIORS. From his stool where he was perched once more like some circus animal, Mr. Stu couldn’t see a single interesting thing though he knew that rummaging was going on. He felt in his stomach a glob of gas, a balloon filled with rising apprehension. Mr. Gab, having done his dirty work, returned to his desk empty-handed, allowing the store to become as law-abiding as before. With his Pater closed, Mr. Stu, as he would from this morning on be called, began to fill the back of Mr. Gab’s head with his own thoughts, enjoying a vacation in another body, even old Mr. Gab’s, which had to be a low-rent cottage in a run-down resort, but — hey — several limps up from the ramshackle where he currently was.

Other eyes, both reasonably well off, saw through gray glass into the street where the world would scarcely pass. He imagined he was sixteen, which was perhaps his age. He had the legs of that Caravaggio cupid which had so exercised Mr. Gab when he’d come upon them the other day in Rüdiger Klessmann’s catalogue of the paintings in the Berlin Museum (remember that liar’s name, Mr. Gab had commanded). Naked, the kid was. Very naked. A pornpainting, Mr. Gab said in sentence. It is written here that this is the figure of a boy about twelve. Sitting on a globe. The posture is contorted, but not like Mr. Stu on his stool, Mr. Stu thought. Look, this Klessmann fellow says that every wrinkle and fold of the skin is reproduced with the utmost realism. Ut-most. Look. What do you see?

U-Stu saw a cupid with arms and thighs wide apart, as wide as full sexual reception might require, and musculated like a twenty-five-year-old wrestler, though wearing the weenie of a boy of six, one nipple showing in a swath of light which flew in conveniently from the left to dispel a general darkness; in fact to fling it aside like a parted robe and reveal a creased and belly-buttoned stomach below a strong broad chest where the nipple lay, as purple as a petal fallen from a frostbitten rose (Mr. Gab had said as if quoting). The head, however, bore a leering drunken grin as salacious as they are in Frans Hals. Those huge thighs, though, Mr. Gab fairly growled, how are they rendered? See the way they are rounded into a silk-soaked softness? (Was he quoting still?) An amazon in the guise of a baby boy. Holding the bow of a violin! What allegorical gimcrackery! But no! another masterpaint, Mr. Gab announced, as if introducing a vaudeville act. And Klessmann dares to call this pornographic pastiche realism!

Caravaggio was simply a ruffian. His darks were merely dramatic, his colors were off, his attitudes appropriate to saloons. He was a pretender in front of reality, and reality had made him a murderer and a convict. Tenebrist indeed. Remember that word. (His assistant tried, but he understood it to mean “tenuous.”) Mr. Gab could be relentless. Carrahvaggeeoh, he’d growl. For him darkness is never delicate. Carrahvaggeeoh didn’t understand what a shadow was — an entire region of the world. Ah…we know where to go for shadows.

By now Mr. Stu was able to interpret Mr. Gab. Realism — truth — was the exclusive property of the photograph. He regularly ridiculed paintings that presented themselves as lifelike. About trompe l’oeil compositions he was particularly withering. What kind of streetcar accident has caused this rabbit, that jug, this — hah! — hunting horn, that — hah! — hat, that knife, that — hey? — horseshoe, and that key — a key! — those two dead birds? — to hop to run to fly to get carried in a carriage to see the smash, rehear the crash, and enjoy the bloody scene? What drew them to this place? These dots of detail? That’s the real? reality is a stupid collection? trophies of a scavenger hunt? Whose eye would they fool? — hey? — whose?

Mr. Stu, now in the guise of Caravaggio, stretched his grand legs wide, even if he wouldn’t fool anyone, and flaunted his cute little sex. Those few who might pass would never look in. Anyway. He wondered, as he had so often, what it would be like to be ordinary and have had an ordinary childhood, not one in a Home where everything had to imitate shoes in a line. And nothing had ever been his: not his bed or blanket, the table at which he drew, not a wall, not a window, not a fork or spoon, lent instead, shared, maybe his underclothes had been his, but only because they wouldn’t let anyone else soil them. He’d left with the clothes on his back as the cliché maintains, so they had to be his: his shoes, and his socks and his bulbous nose. Even now his room was rented, his books were borrowed, his stool belonged to his employer, as did the boxes of photographs, presumably they weren’t all stolen. At the moment, though, he owned a violin and sat heavily on his own globe.

He’d noticed how Mr. Gab did it: how he studied a picture (this one, another Sudek, had showed up out of the blue to be held under Mr. Stu’s nose) until he knew just where the darks went (had he bought it from that haughty high-hatter? that would not have been wise); dark filling almost the whole road except for the wet and glistening dirt that still defined some wagon tracks (the temptation would have been far greater than for another piece of cake), the sky, too, setting with the paling sun, and walls and buildings nothing but edges, tree trunks rising into the dying light, crisp and unconfused (had it been dropped off by the Weasel? God forbid), rows of insulators perched like birds for the night on faintly wired poles, but so composed…made of mist…composed so that the bushes at one end of the panoramic rhymed with the tree limbs at the other; thus the blacks beneath held up the grays above, so the soft glow of the failing sun, which could be still seen in the darkening sky, might lie like a liquid on the muddy lane…and Mr. Gab would inhale very audibly, as if a sigh had been sent him from somewhere, because only once had the world realized these relations; they would never exist again; they had come and gone like a breath.

An image had been etched on an eye.

Mr. Stu had made Mister, all the same, even if he didn’t have a childhood; and he had a job — a job that was his job, no one else’s, as stooled to its heights as an accountant’s — and he had his own room even if it was rented, even if it was paid for by his father figure; and he had a market where he could swipe fruit, a weedy field to sit in now and then, a library card for borrowing books; and a worry which was ruining his reveries. If the cops got Mr. Gab, what would become of Mr. Stu? No job then. No room. He could read in the weeds. But the authorities didn’t like the appearance it gave the neighborhood when he flopped down in the empty lot and looked up at a clutter of clouds or saw inside a deeply receding blue sky a scented silent light.

With Walter Pater parked, Mr. Stu settled on his stool and set his sights on the back of Mr. Gab’s head, and bore into it with his whole being until he felt he was looking out into the empty sun-blown street where now and then a figure would pass, moving more often left than right, while he wondered what was to be done, what he should do to defend them from the calamity that was coming. After closing, after, as he imagined, still wholly inhabiting Mr. Gab, he’d taken that body to bed in the Chinese flophouse where Mr. Gab’s somewhat resourceful assistant had found a curtain made of mediocre lace at the market — near that stall from which, by using the crowd, he’d appropriated fruit — just a cloud of thread to tack to the wall above his window so that now when Mr. Gab’s hand drew the curtain the room grew gray and a few of the city’s lights spangled the frail netting where, bed-clothed, u-Stu in the garb of Mr. Gab could still see, till sleep, a kind of sky, and pretend he was napping in the weeds or smelling space like a moth; so after closing, Gab gone to the flop, what was left of Mr. Stu would go through the boxes one by one and systematically, if there was a system, hunt for pictures that were likely pilfered in order to hide them…yes, by reswapping bodies for the task, putting Gab back in his own boots — maybe too many switcheroos to seem dreamable — and subsequently to slide the suspicious photographs into such other boxes as he’d have collected under his so far fleabagless bed, where no one would ever think to pry, thus cleansing the premises of the taint of loot and securing the safety of what was looking more and more like a possible life.

He swore that were he able to do it, he would work earnestly to improve himself during the remaining existence he’d been given, giving up both fruit and stealing; he’d pass out flyers to stimulate the store; he’d memorize a new word every day and read it — one two three four — like a regiment on the march; he’d—

What, though, could be done about the ones which perched in plain view upon the walls, yet tried to lie about their presence like the purloined letter, even though they could be seen to be what they were: Koudelka, in an instant, glorious, an icon worth worship, or an Emerson, swimming in silence through reedy weeds, or that damn Evans with the foursquareface outstaring stone, or the Abbott tucked away near the rug-hugged doorway; because Gab would feel their loss even if Mr. Stu just replaced the prints and not the hangers; put up at some risk a Harry Callahan or Marc Riboud instead, since who knew if Gab had thieved them too; he’d feel their loss like a draft through a door left ajar, the hairs on the back of his neck would whisper their names in his ears; yet the Koudelka, the Feininger had to go, guilt could not be more loudly advertised. Looking at Lake Michigan Mr. Gab had muttered placement, placement, placement, three times, u-Stu supposed, to honor the three figures standing in smooth lake water, water which merged imperceptibly with a grayed-over sky, three figures perfectly decentered, and the wake of the walking bather…well…as if there’d been some calculation…if not by nature than by Callahan…alas, not a serious name. Yet Callahan, said Mr. Gab, would do.

He could not spirit these evidences from their walls. Suppose he could persuade Mr. Gab to squirrel them away in some quiet sequestership of his own where they couldn’t be seen let alone seized let alone certified as Grabbed by Gab. In so doing, in going along with Mr. Stu’s suggestion, wouldn’t Mr. Gab be confessing to his crimes? Then, though, if he did that, perhaps he’d be relieved of his reticence. What stories Mr. Gab could tell about each one — Cunningham’s magnolia, that late Baldus, or Weston’s two shells — how he had found them, stalked them, and withdrawn them from the owners’ grasps (even slipped them out of their countries) as if they were already as much his as his hand was his, leaving a handclasp to wave farewell to their properties.

At first, of course, u-Stu’s head, heart, conscience were all firmly set against the notion, voiced by their enemy from the earlier street, that Mr. Gab’s stock contained stolen articles. His mind could not figure out how Mr. Gab might have managed. He seemed taciturn not sly, blunt and biased not crafty or devious, and it was difficult to envision Mr. Gab as young, vigorous, and thievish, climbing walls like a lusty vine, seeping like pulverulent air (his word to work on for the day) under doorframe or window sash; yet so quick-fingered as to pry open cases in a wink, slip a photo from its frame in a trice, and then to saunter carefree and concealing from a museum or pretentious shop straight through customs declaring only a smile and a bit of a cough. Nor had he the heart to imagine Mr. Gab to be no more than a fence for those more slick and daring than he — as if Weasel were — what a laugh; yet appearances were deceiving, who knew better than he how that was, for he, Mr. Stu, no longer the Stupid Assistant, never had been, only looked so, on account of his one cross eye and leaking lip. Conscience…well conscience made a coward of him. Made him fear a fall. From his stool of course. From his room, job, only relation. Because he actually would have loved to believe that Mr. Gab was a Pimpernel of prints. He knew that conscience, if it had to compete with pride, wouldn’t stand a chance, and could be cowed into silence. So that to have the prince of purloiners for a pa…well…that would be okay. That would be quite all right.

He might have to get used to some such idea. Evidence was more prevalent than fingerprints. There was that envelope postmarked Montreal in which the Baldus was, contrary to custom, still kept: an absolutely perfect albumen silver print of the train station at Toulon, with the Baldus signature stamp lower right; the envelope carrying the capital letters CCA outlined in red on its front flap: rails running straight through the glass-gated shed into the everlasting; the envelope dated in a dark circle May 1, 1995: about a foot and a half wide, the sky, as almost always in Baldus, kept a clear cream, the scene so crisp as to seem seen through translucent ice; the print in heavy plastic slid between tough protective cardboard: uncluttered, freight cars parked in place, not a sight of mortal man as usually, in Édouard Baldus, was the case, a document that documented as definitely as a nailed lid; but now, so overcoated, the thing bulked in the box it was shoved in, crying out to the curious.

What a quandary. Surely Mr. Gab would see the wisdom in such a gleaning of the incriminating prints whose very excellence made them enemies, and surely he would understand, in such circumstances, the good sense in ceasing for a time to acquire anything more that might entrap Mr. Gab against his will in the terrible toils of the law; yes, surely he would have to recognize how wise it was to heed these warnings, to back off and go double doggo; but Mr. Stu knew that Mr. Gab would bite on that Sudek if it were offered, that he could not resist Quality which overcame him like a cold; because what he understood to be Quality was all that counted in the world, Mr. Stu had come to grasp that. Not warmth, it threatened the prints; not food which merely smeared the fingers; not leisure, for where would an eye go on vacation but to its graphs — to bathe in their beauty as if at a beach? Not shelter since his pictures furnished him his bricked lanes and cobbled streets, damp from rain, and all his buildings defined by shade and the white sky and the dark freshly turned fields and the veined rocks and river water frozen while falling into a steaming gorge; not a woman’s love, since the photos gave up their bodies ceaselessly and were always welcoming and bare and always without cost — after, once, you had them; further than that there was the flower petal’s perfection, the leaf’s elemental elegance, the militancy of rail and vagrancy of river line, rows of trees, a hill, a château, a vast stretch of desert dotted with death and small mean rocks. Mr. Stu had a dim hunch about how, for Mr. Gab, they had replaced his mother’s flesh. I touch you. You touch eye. That eye owns the world.

So what to do. Just broach the subject? Just say: I think, Mr. Gab, we should take these precious ones away for safer keeping. There are robbers out there looking for swag. The richness of your stock might get about, remarked here, mentioned there, whispered around until the information reaches the wrong ear. And then in the night when you are asleep up there, wherever it is, some thug may force his way in, easy enough even if the shutters are shut and the door is locked; these days they have pry irons and metal-cutting torches and lock picks and credit cards they cleverly put to illegal use. Mr. Gab, is that you, sir, someone said, startling Mr. Stu out of his thoughts as though they were dreams. We, sir, are the police. You have been denounced.

4 THE DAY OF RECKONING ARRIVES

I’ve—?

You have been informed upon.

Mr. Gab gave Mr. Stu a look of such anguish and accusation his assistant’s heart broke. Mr. Stu felt his blood was draining from him and put his hand to his nose. Then Mr. Stu returned Mr. Gab’s anguish with his own, a pitifully twisted expression on an already twisted face. Mr. Gab immediately knew his suspicion was false and unfounded; it had followed the awful announcement as swiftly as the sting from a slap; there had been no time to take thought, show sense, conceal his feeling. He realized how horribly he had wounded his adopted kid, his loyal assistant whom he’d helped from the Home and taught to grow up, reaching the rank of Mister. Mr. Gab understood now that he’d left a son a second time. Whose only mistake was being born. Or being in the neighborhood when Mr. Gab was nabbed.

We have a warrant.

A warrant?

To search your shop and to remove these boxes and place them in our custody while they are examined. It’s been alleged you have been in receipt of stolen goods.

Mr. Gab tried to rise from his chair by pushing at its arms with his fists. I have no receipts. Long ago they each arrived, these photographs, like strangers off a boat, you understand. There are decades of desire boxed here. Though they are good photographs. I admit that. Good. It makes for envy in others. But he was not speaking to the detective who had probably been chosen for the job because he didn’t look like a detective is supposed to look, because his look, now, was deeply troubled too. And it made his figure seem puny, his hands small, his nose abruptly concluded as if it had once fallen off. Mr. Gab was not even attending to himself. He was being borne down by a lifeload of anxiety and a moment of misguided distrust.

It is said these boxes are full of stolen pictures.

They are mine. My prints. They live here.

These pictures may not belong to you.

They are prints not pictures. They are photographs not pictures. They are photographic prints.

They may not belong to you.

They do. They belong. In these, of all boxes, they belong. But Mr. Gab was not attending to the officer either. Bulky men were entering the shop, one by one, though they had begun trying to enter two by two. The detective held forward a folded sheet with an insecure hand. Out in the street, Mr. Stu saw the Russian without his hat — his hair, in the sun, shining from the effort of a thick pomade. The bulky men wore overalls with a moving-company logo on them. Here is the writ that empowers this, the detective said, beginning softly but adding a hiss by the end. He sensed he was not impressive. He shook, again, his folded paper. Mr. Gab still sat as solemn as a cat and seemed to be registering one blank after another. The warrant was placed in his lap. This gives us the right to remove (the man waved) and to search the premises. If the allegations — which I must tell you come from high up — powerful government agencies — if they are unfounded, these materials will be returned to you. You shall be receipted.

Receipted? At that, Mr. Gab gathered himself. The paper slid to the floor as he rose. For the first time, he seemed to be taking in the police and the moving men. These are my eyes, and the life of my eyes. One man bore a puzzled look but picked a box up in his arms anyway. Bring in the hand trucks, somebody said. You are using Van Lines? There will be a complete and careful inventory, the detective reassured him, looking intently about the store. Maybe you will finally learn what you have. Then he peered at Mr. Gab. You understand, sir, that later we shall want to speak to you at length. A hand trolley stacked with a box at its top marked PRAGUE rolled out. PARIS NIGHTLIFE went next.

MISCELLANEOUS LANDSCAPES followed.

There are not a lot of these prints left, Mr. Stu heard himself say.

Why don’t you help us by taking those pictures on the hangers down, the detective suggested to Mr. Stu. That way, nothing will get bent or soiled. So Mr. Stu did. First finding an empty carton to keep them in. Which took time because he was bloodless as a voodoo victim, and the bulky men and their boxes were in all the aisles. The enormity of everything took his blood’s place.

One of the movers stopped for a moment to stare at a photograph Mr. Stu was about to unfasten. How dare you, Mr. Stu shouted. The burly man shrugged and went about his business. No one else cared.

Mr. Gab no longer protested. He simply stood beside his desk and chair and with an empty gaze followed the men as they pushed their trolleys past him. Mr. Stu made out a truck parked at the curb. Against its pale gray side the Russian figure leaned. As each box was loaded into the rear of the truck, he wrote something on a clipboard. Mr. Stu suddenly thought: where are his witnesses? Every transaction took place in the back, behind the rug, between the two interested parties, and was always in cash, Mr. Stu had been given to understand. There weren’t any records. What could they prove?

Mr. Stu rocked into the movers’ doorway. You shit from a stuffed turkey, he shouted, though it was doubtful the Russian understood him, he hardly looked up from his list. Turkey turd, yeah! A big moving man easily hipped him out of the portal. We’ll get you guys, he later feared he had u-stupidly said. Mr. Gab’s position or posture hadn’t altered. His eyes were unnaturally wide and seemed dry. Why was his face, then, so wet all over? One aisle of tables was vacant. How strange the shop seemed without its brown boxes. Now the entering men with their empty trolleys went down the open aisle and returned to the street through one that was solidly cased. Wire hangers lay in a tangle on the trestle tops. The big moving men were tossing the beanbags on the floor, often in fun. Mr. Stu thought of saving several of the displayed photos by concealing them under his shirt, but the detective had two public eyes on his every move. The toe of one of Mr. Gab’s shoes was on a corner of the warrant. Tears were sliding from his eyes in a continuous clear stream.

Evidence, Mr. Stu feared. They had evidence aplenty. Who had owned the Julia Cameron before it had come to hide and hovel here? she who specialized in wild hair and white beards? about whom he’d read had breathed the word “beautiful” and thereupon died, her photographs “tumbling over the tables.” Was this an orphanage Mr. Gab ran, and were all these wonders children who had wandered or run away from their homes and families to find themselves in alleys and doorways and empty squares instead of warming hearthsides and huggie havens. No, they all had owners once and, Mr. Stu feared, had been — as if by fairies — stolen. Picsnapped. So they’d be traced — every trade and traduction. And then what? Mr. Gab’s presence in the town nearest his lordship’s estate, his lodging at the inn, his visit to the household — each would count against him; his travels to Paris at opportune times, his many friends in the army who might turn up a bit of art here and there for some of the crown’s coins, complaints from shops about losses they had suffered shortly after his employ — they would surely count against him too; oh so many collaborators, filchers anonymous, partners in crime, many of whom would be still around to testify, and, for a break from the court, would see no need to lie. The prospect before Mr. Stu and Mr. Gab, Mr. Stu decided, was nothing short of calamitous. That was what he had thought to call it before: calamitous. In any case, and the awful moment came back to him like a bad meal, Mr. Stu could hardly work for a man who was so immediately ready to suspect him; who believed he might be a traitor, a child sent by society to win his trust, trip him up, and dispatch him to jail.

Mrs. Cameron was a woman of good character, and did not retouch, Mr. Gab had once confidently claimed, but she was far too social in her choice of subjects. Social might have been a good idea, Mr. Stu now wanted to say to Mr. Gab. Friends in high places might have stood Mr. Gab in good stead. Tennyson. Darwin. Could come to the rescue. Attest to Mr. Gab’s character. Honest fellow, as trustworthy as a hound. His museum was being removed, his life looted. Such a painful wrench and one deceitfully turned. The Russian — and Mr. Stu now saw his blurry figure counting boxes as they were taken off to jail — might have been an Albanian in disguise. He might be wearing that goo to fool Mr. Gab and Mr. Stu into thinking him sufficiently shiny to do business with. In reality, he was probably some Fed who lived in town with wife and child.

What’s back there, the detective said, as if asking permission when he wasn’t, and pushing the rug aside to see. Kitchen, came his voice again. George, he shortly cried. One of the busy big men turned away from his work and went to join the detective out of all sight. They will surely find the special treasures, Mr. Stu thought. Soon enough the big man returned carrying within both arms a large box clasped against his chest. What’s this, the detective asked when he reappeared. It has no label. Tell Amos to list it as “Kitchen Closet,” he shouted after Shoulders as Shoulders bore his burden out.

Mr. Gab’s eyes ran without relief.

It’s terrible. Why do you have to take everything, Mr. Stu asked desperately. Can’t you see how awful it is for Mr. Gab?

What?

Mr. Stu tried to speak more clearly — slowly and precisely as, in the Home, he had once been taught. By switch and rule and ruler.

Order of the court, seized on suspicion, the detective finally said, leaving the place himself. The walls were bare except for the shiny zinc heads of the roofing nails. The tables sheltered nothing under them now, while the emptied tops merely supported that absence, and reflected the glare of canned bulbs through a mist made of shoe-scuffled dust. The air though was heavy, and Mr. Stu felt the trestles groan. Then the men with their big damp backs were gone. The truck was driven off, and the detective and his Albanian henchman vanished as though they’d become street trees.

Mr. Gab was where he’d been the entire time, still painfully silent, his face oozing away into grief, perhaps not to return. Mr. Stu, out of a need to soften the barrenness about them, slowly turned the cans off, so only the late-afternoon light, made gauzy by the dirty window it oozed through, illuminated the room. Then Mr. Gab moved to wreeeeek the shutters down. Here and there a streak of sun would reach deeply into the darkness of the shop. What are we going to do? Mr. Stu spoke to himself more clearly than he spoke to strangers. At least you have those photographs engraved on the balls of your eyes.

Don’t accuse me, Mr. Gab finally said, smearing his face with a shirtsleeve. What evidence can they have — from that fellow, I mean, Mr. Stu ventured. I gave him the slip, Mr. Gab said slowly, separating the words with consternation. He wanted a receipt for his cash. So I gave him the slip. He’ll have a — Well, maybe not, Mr. Stu said and received a bleak look for his pains. Not the first times, but the last time. Then I gave him one. Still, Mr. Stu persisted, you couldn’t have known — I knew, and he knew I knew, Mr. Gab said firmly. It was a Lange I had to have. A face of pain — pale gray — as if — a face worn wooden by a wind. I’m sorry, Mr. Gab added. They’ve taken away my beauties, but I’ve taken away your world, u-Stu, as thoroughly as they’ve taken away mine. Mr. Gab wavered when he walked, a pushover who now resembled the old rug he had hung for a door.

Mr. Stu sat carefully in Mr. Gab’s chair. It was not all that comfortable. Slivers of sun, as though from a fire at their front door, raced through the shutters and ran up the rear wall, now wholly exposed, the faint shadow of a table against the plaster like a patch of unsunburned skin. When someone passed by on the sidewalk, the pattern palpitated. It was true that Mr. Gab didn’t have much of a life. He sat in this not very comfortable chair most of every day, letting his eyes lie idle or roam randomly about like a foraging pooch, thinking who knew what thoughts, if he thought any, and if he thought any, who knew that either. Now, and even more often then, Mr. Gab would reluctantly help a customer, and once in a great while do a bit of business behind the rug where the rug quite muffled the doing. You’d have to account it a life overflowing with empty. But that life had better prepare to be so much worse, and embrace mere absence like a lover. Nevertheless, who knew how to count these things: the quality of an existence — especially when you compared it to the meager stuff that took place in the deranged world outside — in walking these formerly narrow aisles, talking occasionally, eating meagerly, drinking rarely, sitting rudely on a board seat long hours, leafing a leaf from an out-of-date mag, arguing with an image in a catalogue, watching faint figures pass?

Mr. Stu let his eye run back and forth along the light like a squirrel on a wire. His life wasn’t a winner either. Yet he had a job, a room, a library card. And he could open a book as if it were a door and disappear. He could inhale air in his weedy lot. He could look. He’d even learn. Yet he’d already found Sundays a stretch. He was supposed to stay home and pretend to be a person of substance in that slummy brown shoebox space of his. Itemize the alley. When the walls were whisked away? When the window went, what could he count? When his little box of belongings was put on the sidewalk outside, what would he manage? Mr. Gab, Mr. Gab, what were they to do? And when they took Mr. Gab downtown for questioning, and found what they would find in box after box, folder after folder, plastic pocket after pocket, how could either of them stand it?…endure it?…live through it? It was…awful…unrelievedly…foul. Mr. Gab reappeared with a bundle. He wore, for once, a wry smile. Quick as a cat Mr. Stu vacated the chair.

There are signs the dick went up the ladder to my loft, Mr. Gab said, but the dick missed this, wrapped in a sheet, under my cot. He held it out as you would a tray of sweets. There was a great wad of sheet to be clumsily unwound before a photogravure, rubber-banded between cardboards for its protection, was released. Mr. Gab put the print where a streak of sunlight crossed a trestle so they could see it. An Eastern moment, Mr. Gab said softly, and Mr. Stu saw the most beautiful silklike scene he’d ever, which Mr. Gab explained was a Stieglitz from 1901 called Spring Showers. Composed by a god, Mr. Gab whispered, as if the detective might overhear. He also spoke in awe, Mr. Stu knew. Like an oriental hanging, Mr. Gab said, as though the mottled gray surface was that of cloth. Less than half a foot wide, a foot tall, made almost solely of shadow, Mr. Stu saw there in the dimness a street sweeper in wet hat and wet slicker pushing a wide broom along a wet gutter toward the photograph’s wet left edge. Despite Mr. Stu’s despair the image made him feel good for a moment, then worse. Just off-center, though on the same side as the sweeper, so that the right two-thirds of the picture was empty of everything except some soft faint shapes that represented traffic on the street, there grew a sidewalk tree with a gently forking trunk protected, perhaps from being pissed on, by a round wrought-iron fence whose pickets were thin as sticks. Surrounded by the sweetest vagueness, the tree rose from the walk on its own wet and wavy shadow as though that dripping shadow were a root, easing toward its dim thin upper limbs, which were dotted with brief new leaves and one perched bird, to faintly foliate away in indistinctness, though there were hints that tall buildings might block you if you entered the background, as well as shimmers that signified some moving vehicles, and the loom of a large ornamental urn — was it? — the viewer could not be sure.

What was certain was the photograph’s depth, its purity, its delicacy. And the silken faintly hazy and amorphous gray that made up most of this small and simple streetside scene was the most beautiful, most comforting, most expressive quality of all. It was everywhere as wet, Mr. Stu realized, as Mr. Gab’s face had been before his sleeve had swabbed it. Gloom began descending like a jacket hood, because his admiration could not keep misery away, not for long. Beauty eventually increased the pain. Perhaps not in better days. Mr. Stu understood incompleteness for he was plete aplenty. Mr. Gab understood loss because he was its cause as well as its victim. Pictures someone had taken, he’d taken, taken and hid. Now these prints had been wrenched from him in turn, and were nowhere where they might be gratefully seen — pictures that had been selfishly sequestered, then put like bad kids “in custody,” to be examined by eyes that were mean and sharpened by the crude rough looks of criminals.

His shoulders in such a slump they ceased to be, Mr. Gab went with his treasure through the carpet again. Part of the rug had pulled from its tacks so that now its hang was uneven. It bore a diamond design that Mr. Stu had never noticed before, cut deeply into its pelt. In better days he would have dreamed it outlined a playing field where figures the size of small ants might run about. Throughout the shop sunlight flickered for a moment. Someone was passing. In better days the store would still be open. Mr. Stu thought that when masses were made of mist and shadow, as they were in Stieglitz’s painterly picture, and loomed without any consequences caused by bulk or weight, they possessed their own kind of being, and that the photograph, which had so little that was definite in it, nevertheless presented us with a whole world made of fragility and levitation. What would it mean to a man to have made such — there was no other word for it — such beauty? to have drawn it in through rainwatered eyes? to have captured it in a small now antiquated box? brought it to life almost amniotically? (another from his daily assignment of words) and sent it forth in the style of a far-off culture that he had learned about solely from photographic samples. Would it fill his life with satisfaction and achievement, or would it sadden him, since a loveliness of that kind could never be repeated, could never be realized again?

Mr. Gab had treasured his collection. However acquired. He had gathered good things together that had perhaps been stolen and dispersed once already. He had achieved an Archive, made his own museum in the midst of a maelstrom. Didn’t that count? So Mr. Stu thought maybe Mr. Gab could say he hadn’t known they were anyone’s legitimate possessions any longer, but were the spoils of war, refugees of slavery, expropriation, and murder. Of course they could be returned to their proper homes if they had any, as long as it was their real wish to be rehung on the dour walls of grandiose old estates with their long cold halls given over to stuffily conventional family portraits and other tasteless bragging, to languish in the huge mansions or palaces they’d come from, or to sit in shame propped up on some lectern like a speech no one would give and no one would wish to hear; that would be okay, provided there’d be no further punishment for Mr. Gab, since he’d had pain enough from his loss to surpass that of most lovers. Lover: that was right, because who, Mr. Stu surmised, had looked at them as though they were gray lace, who had weighed a shadow against a substance, a dark line against a pale space, the curvature of a street’s recession against the forefrontal block of a building, so as to feel the quality of judgment in every placement, the rightness of every relation, and how these subtle measures made the picture dance with the ideal gaiety of an ideal life.

We pass through frames, Mr. Gab had said. We walk about our rooms, our house, the neighborhood, and our elbow enters into a divine connection with a bus bench or bubbler in the park, a finial, a chair or letter lying on a hall table, which is, in an instant — click — dissolved. The nose, the earlobe, the bosom, the elbow, the footfall, the torso’s shadow pass in and out of awkward — in and out of awful — in and out of awesome combinations just as easily as air moves; the sublime, the suddenly supremely meaningful and redemptive moment is reached, achieved, left, dissolved into the dingy, only, in a few frames further, to connive at more communities. It is grace and disgrace constantly created and destroyed. The right click demonstrates how, in an instant, we, or our burro, or our shovel, or our eye or nose or nipple, were notes in a majestic symphony. A world of self-concerned things is suddenly singing a selfless concerned song: that was what the fine photographer, over and over, allowed to be seen in solemn apology for what should have been heard.

Nothing had been heard from Mr. Gab in quite a while, though Mr. Stu hadn’t counted breaths; however his employer’s retreat should not have been surprising since he’d just lost a wife, more dear than life, to a bunch of hand trolleys. He’d been in the dark on his garret cot sobbing like a sad child, Mr. Stu bet, why not? In a room fixed to the top of a shabby ladder like a squirrel’s nest in a tree; what could be sillier than where it was? and Mr. Stu had wanted to laugh when he first saw the way the ladder led up through a hole from which coal could once have dropped. Perhaps Mr. Gab could be comforted by the darkness since it might suggest an end to things — no more moving men moving his treasures out, treasures to be treated like contraband — less anxiety, fewer humiliations — dark at midday was what this day deserved — so perhaps he’d been somewhat slightly — well, not reassured — but protected from any additional pain, such as being pierced through and through by his unwarranted suspicion of his former employee, Mr. Stu, a feeling that had been turned on — click — like a light, when the strange man had said the phrase — the curdling phrase—“informed upon.”

You have been given up, Mr. Gab. We gotcha. Dead to rights. We got yer goods too. Yer a looter, a despoiler, a thief, a fence, a flown-away father, an ungrateful and suspicious boss. Now you’ll have to bear your loss like just desserts. Go to bed like your boy has, time upon time, to cry inside the pillow till the pillow flats. Go to bed like your boy has, countlessly, to imagine the bitter oncoming day. When you will walk about a barren store. When you will begin to miss me. When you’ll be invited to “come downtown.” Go to bed like your boy has, heart beaten by shame, sore and in despair he is alive. Go to bed like your boy has, angry at all, alone as a bone that has lost its dog. Head screams aren’t effective. Head howls aren’t effective. Headlongs aren’t worth a damn. Seek some solace in the fact that you aren’t being gnawed on at the moment, not being yelled at, at the moment, not being guffaw’d, not being always, at anything, the worst, to be the basket into which everything is eventually tossed. Seek solace we advise…seek solace, don’t we say? The one photograph that remains, had it been unshrouded and claimed, would nonetheless have been engraved on your weeping eyes.

Mr. Stu felt a wadded sheet at his uneven feet. He picked it up, to unwrap and refold, only to find his arms weren’t long enough, so he spread it out on a trestle where bright slivers of sunshine from the shutters fell in lively white streaks. Mr. Stu drew a roll of masking tape from Mr. Gab’s desk drawer, tape Mr. Gab used now and then to repair boxes, and began to block out the light, initially not easy because it bled through the thin tape, and it took several layers to make the glow even faint. By biting the tape into thin strips and making its stickum cling, Mr. Stu gradually darkened the room. Now there was only a halo to see by. It ran around the rug and apparently came from a light in the kitchen. Bring a pin, Mr. Gab, please, Mr. Stu called out. Though he thought he heard in his head the beating of a desperate heart, Mr. Stu boldly drew back the rug and entered the kitchen where he found, after a few minutes of pawing about in drawers which otherwise yielded little in the way of contents, a roll of stout picture wire. Bring a pin, Mr. Gab, please, Mr. Stu shouted up the ladder at the hole that was even darker than the inside of a hose.

Mr. Stu was feeling his way to his idea. He realized, while groping between trestles, that he was performing the steps of his project in the wrong order. Consequently it was with difficulty that he found the nails he wanted on opposing walls, and with difficulty that he finally fastened one end of his wire to a conveniently big nail, and with difficulty that he unrolled the wire — held over his head — to the other side and found another roofer to wind his wire around, allowing the remainder of the roll to dangle. Now he had a firm line across the room to fling the sheet over, but he was unsure of what came next. Bring a pin, please, Mr. Gab, he called, suddenly weary and useless.

It took some time — and after the slow return of resolution — to hang the sheet, though he should have been more expert, having hung a lot of laundry out to dry in his day, even standing on a short stool to do his pinning when the line was beyond his reach. He stared into the dark, making nothing out. What’s the idea, Mr. Gab asked. They stood in pitch now that Mr. Gab had turned the kitchen light off. I just thought we might—. Mr. Stu began. Ah, of course, you’ve occluded the shutters. Tape, Mr. Stu said. Something to do. You might have thought I was crying, Mr. Gab said. I was not. I was at a loss even for that. I didn’t, Mr. Stu said, think. You might have thought I was huddling, Mr. Gab said. I was not. I was too tired to lie down. I didn’t, Mr. Stu said. There is nothing for my eyes to adjust to, Mr. Gab said. It’s as dark as the hole in a hose, said Mr. Stu.

They both stood without the whereabouts of the other. Say something more so I’ll know where you are, said Mr. Gab, clearing his throat as if he were warning a boat about a shoal. I thought if we pinholed a bit of the tape, we’d get here, on this sheet you can’t see, a bit of picture. Something to do, said Mr. Stu. Mr. Gab bumped gratefully into his desk. Mr. Stu heard its drawer being withdrawn. I’ve a hatpin here somewhere. Rats — ouch. No. I didn’t stick myself, just thought I might have. Mr. Gab had to get close up because the tape on the shutters was barely visible even close up. If I were to put a hole, say, here — what—

Suddenly there was a faint loose smear on the sheet. Needs to be closer up, was the opinion of Mr. Stu. Needs to be farther back, Mr. Gab decided. In the sheetlight it was easier to find the tightly fastened wire and unwind it from its nail, Mr. Gab doing one side, Mr. Stu the other. They moved in concert slowly toward the rear of the room, watching an image grow and slowly brighten. Now, cried Mr. Gab, and they both scrabbled for nailheads, feeling the wall gingerly as though it were flesh not their own, holding the wire as high as they could, which wasn’t very, in Mr. Stu’s case, because the sheet dragged on his left side. Shouldn’t let it get dirty, Mr. Gab said in his familiar cross voice which was suddenly reassuring. The sheet, however, hadn’t hung clear for many feet before it rolled over tables and caught on their crude edges. The image, now rather sharply focused, ran like a frieze across the top of the screen, but then the sheet tented toward the front of the shop as though there were a wind gusting from its rear and filling it out like a sail.

Without a further word needed, Mr. Gab and Mr. Stu began to shove the tables — not an easy thing to do — toward the sides of the store so there’d be a space for the sheet to hang and its image to cohere. Sawhorses don’t roll; they wouldn’t even skid; and beanbags were treacherously everywhere. Mr. Stu knew not to curse, but he nearly cried. It was futile. Why were they doing this? What had his idea been? Mr. Gab would go to prison. Mr. Stu imagined this might take place tomorrow. And homeless Mr. Stu, whose deforming birth marks bespoke bad begetting, would get the heave-ho from every eye, from every back a turn, and even from those on pleasant picnics.

Quickly, quickly, your stool, Mr. Stu, you mustn’t miss this. Mr. Stu dragged his perch awkwardly forward. Beanbags bore him malice. Mr. Gab had turned his chair to face the screen, and there…and there…there was their street, clear as clean water. There bloomed a building of red brick. Of a deep rich rose they had never before seen. It was…it was as if the entire brick had been hotly compressed the way the original clay had been, yet each brick was still so supremely each because the mortar between them was like a living stream, and the pocking was as crisp as craters photographed from space, individual and maybe named for Greek gods. Where the brick encountered a lintel of gray stone, the contrast was more than bugle calls in a basement. The gray had a clarity one found only in the finest prints. Mr. Gab’s hand rose toward the scene in involuntary tribute. Where the glass began its passage through the pane, light leaped the way water encircles the thrown stone, though now they were seeing it from below like a pair of cautiously gazing fish. Further on, in the darker parts, were reflected shades of such subtlety that, still a fish, Mr. Gab gaped.

The sheet bore creases of course. It would have to be ironed. The hang of the cloth over the wire could use some adjustment, perhaps a little weight attached to the bottom edge might improve the stretch, and the wire itself might be profitably tightened. Nevertheless, toiling in the dark, they’d done a good job.

We’ll keep watching. Someone will be along soon. In a red sweater maybe. How would a red sweater look passing that brick, Mr. Gab wondered. Such a spectacle. Well, Mr. Gab, it is upsidedown, Mr. Stu said. I should say “thank you” to you, Mr. Stu, Mr. Gab said. You’ve given me quite a gift. And upsidedown will be all right. Like reflections from water. We shall adjust. I guess it will be, Mr. Stu said, but not even his ears knew whether he spoke in earnest agreement or out of sad acceptance of it. It…it’s colored through. Yes, Mr. Stu, and what colors, too. Have you ever seen such? And look at the contours, so precise while staying soft and never crudely edgy. Never…you know…I never saw this building before. I never observed our street. We might wash the window — that bit in front of the pinhole, Mr. Stu suggested. Splendid idea, Mr. Stu, agreed Mr. Gab. But it is upsidedown, Mr. Stu ventured. They gave one another looks which were gifts not quite accepted. In color, Mr. Stu reminded. Sweet as rainbow ice cream, insisted Mr. Gab. A car…a cab…flashed by. The chariot of the sun, Mr. Gab exclaimed. Oh, Mr. Stu, this will indeed do. The bricks reddened to the color of rare roast beef. It will do just fine.

~ ~ ~

Dear Sir/Madam,

I understand you have helped people like myself in the past and I would like you to consider helping me at this time. My situation has changed drastically in the last several years and I have lost all that I have with the exception of my home. At this writing I have after all this time just started a part time position with the hope that will eventually lead to a full time employment.

The reason I am writing you this letter is I am in desperate need of money to replace my roof so that I may continue to have a roof over my head. I have struggled to do repairs but have run out of money to complete the roof.

I understand that you may have been in a similiar situation some time in your life and my promise to you is “I will in turn help someone as you have helped me, once I am financially stable”. All I need is $7900.00 to replace the roof and will be in your debt should you find it in your heart to help me.

You may personally contact me at between 3pm and 5pm Monday thru Friday as I am working other hours and a friend accepts my calls if I am not available.

My gratefull appreciation in advance.

Sincerly

Actual begging letter to author; only the name of the writer is deleted.

~ ~ ~

Hardy held the can firmly in his fat little fingers. He was old enough to be ashamed of the label: a cheap brand of brown bean soup — or was it chili? He slipped from his seat and walked warily to the front of the room where he placed the soup, facedown, on the heap of cereal boxes, pasta packages, and miscellaneous tins of mixed fruit, Spam, creamed corn, sauerkraut, sugar peas, and sardines. He heard jingling behind him that sounded like loose change. And the patterpad of sports-shod feet. This shouldn’t be happening on K Street. He began walking as rapidly, as purposefully, as vigorously as he could. A dark arm swung itself alongside him. Sir. Sir. It said. Some kids had come with two cans or one bag of rice and one round box of quakered oats. We’ve already given — in my homeroom — quite a lot, Hardy’s father felt he had to remind his son. I have to set an example for the kids — in my own homeroom — show benevolence. But — you know — we’re not here to feed the world. We can take on — through my homeroom — just one unfortunate — one less unfortunate — one deserving family per year. Sir. Whatever change you have would be helpful. Hardy could hear the coins the man had already commanded jingachinging in a pocket, chinging because the extorter had to be loping to catch up with his extortee. Maybe the sound was meant to prime the pump. Hatcheck girls put a bill or two in their tip glasses for the same reason. She said if you must you must but you must promise to stop your begging, poor boy. The face alongside him had huge eyes. Pupils dark as dirty dimes. On bright hard paper. It was not coins but chains that were jingling. Hardy was offended by a row of square white teeth, plump moist lips, bumpy black skin that needed a bit of sanding. The man — the panhandler — had short stiff hair like a brush all business. A little change will do a lot of good here. Hardy looked straight ahead at the hollow of her throat so he saw her breast out of the corner of his eyes when she pulled aside her bra the way he caught sight of the box of fig newtons among all those bags and cans, and surprised himself, even at that age, by experiencing desire’s definite tug. He judged himself cowardly. He couldn’t confront. He was consumed by anger, cornered on a big street. Was the world without shame? Running alongside him like another train. At goddamn noontime. Hardy hastened back to his desk and sat with solemnly folded hands while others went forward to deliver their contributions. The class had already recited the Pledge of Allegiance. The pledge scarcely bound you beyond a single day; it could no more be counted on to last than the visit of a fly, because it had to be renewed so frequently, like a magazine subscription that ran for five minutes. Allegiance must surely lapse altogether during weekends. There were kids in the class, poorer than any probable beneficiary, who had brought ostentatiously large bottles of juice or packages of cookies featuring biggish pictures of the plump round toothsome sweets, cut open (in their pictures) to show they were full of filling. He was daily made aware he had no secretary; one of the few in the firm to be without such a sign of success; but he slit the envelope deftly nevertheless and angrily blew it open. I’m not paid for this. How could Hardy claim he had no change when the fellow could hear it rattling around inside him as though flung about in the dryer. After all, if Hardy could hear his pursuer jingle, his pursuer could certainly hear the frightened jangle of his prey. Big brown bull’s-eyed white eyes as advertised, toast-flecked, Nigerian maybe, skin dark enough to be nighttime, and like a crescent moon a confident and shiny smile. Hardy hated him. He could escape by turning into a store. And if he did? Shirts, ties, even hats nobody ever wore anymore were on sale, and Hardy imagined he’d see straight ahead at the rear of the shop a changing room he might scoot into to hide until the coast was clear. Her nipple stared directly at him, pink and perky in a brown pool that made his pulse hear itself in his head, hardly pounding yet, but audible to his reddening ears. The sheet was folded neatly in threes according to convention — Hardy always noticed that — and began with improper propriety: “Dear sir. I understand you have helped people like myself in the past…” Into the big pink palm he put his handful of nickels dimes and quarters. Good quality. Not a penny among them. Bless you, sahr, the face said, beaming. Sir was sahr now? Hardy hated himself for giving in, for being a coward, an easy mark. How did the fellow know? It probably took years or weeks and days of experience. To spot them. Him. The EZ mark. She called it the Cringe; he called it the Gratitude Game. He begged and then was grateful. She acquiesced and accepted. The arm was black not because it was bare and belonged to a very blueblack man, but because the blueblack man was wearing a black turtleneck and black pants and black-and-white athletic shoes. His hair was brisker than a cold breeze. He was…well…he was well dressed. The King of K Street. Requests came in the mail — constantly. Scarcely a day at his desk and his secretary — if he had one — would have slit open some charity’s appeal, just slit, since Hardy liked to throw away the slush himself, examine everything, the envelopes designed to look as if they contained a government check, at catalogues full of motorcycle parts, even ads for health insurance, so he would have her just open them — slit ’em — he imagined that she had a slick wrist — and pile them on his desk in a neat stack — biggest on bottom, next, next — for him to sneer or laugh or growl at before tossing them into recycle. National Preservation. The Heart Association. Multiple Sclerosis. Red Cross. March of Dimes. Give generously. Your contribution will enable us to make more mailings. Save the Whales, the Environment, the Seals, the Whooping Cranes, the Sea Turtles. Your contribution will feed a future thief for a whole week. Stop the Loggers. Defeat Cancer. Support the Fraternal Order of Police. The Salvation Army. The United Way. Your contribution will enable our board to enjoy luxurious surroundings when we next meet in Coral Gables. Protect and Serve is the blue-coat motto. Just who is the lucky recipient of this attention? The police themselves, my boy, who are never about when the panhandlers pan. He’d been shaken down at high noon, shaken in full public view, shaken till his change withdrew from an embarrassed pocket and fell out of his crestfallen paw. It was humiliating but she loved to have him lick her like a puppy. Why did he do it? He did it because he was a coward. He did it because she was better at being beautiful than any woman he would ever be likely to know. Broad pink nails, so striking on fingers so blackly barked. A coward a coward they called it a wuss, being a wuss, nothing worse. Miss Rudge, who will our food bags be given to? Why, a poor family, of course. But what one. You should say, Hugh, to whom. To whom, okay? Well, we don’t want to embarrass anyone, do we? Would you like folks to know if you had to wear another kid’s cast-off things? I wear my older brother’s worn-out rags. She gave her body. He gave her gratitude. It seemed a fair exchange. But we’re just asked to bring food. There will be — from the teachers, I expect — some no longer needed things. From good folk here and there. Items of benevolence added. Anyway, what if you had to eat leavings? Hardy had selected the can himself. He’d been told to. Pick out one we really don’t want. Like these peas? Of course not, we love peas. Granny’s Sweet Brown Beans. Let’s see the label. Oh them. Take that one then. It’s soup. With the dent. Or chili beans conless of carne. After all, we have to give so much to your father’s homeroom, Miss Rudge will understand your modest compliance. Anyway, sweets are good, sweets are just the ticket; they’ve all got mouths full of sweet teeth rotted to their roots. Hardy knew his father’s room had to sport the best — that meant most bountiful — box. The other teachers would admire — well, envy — how much more Hardy’s father could extort from his kids, so much more than they pried from theirs. Out of others only modest contributions. He remembered midget Frigidaires. And cooling closets. You are such a silly, she said, letting her skirt slip past her knees. He went to his. Please. Please. Just a bit of change, whatever you have, bless bless. Damn black bastard’s nerve. Neck hung with gold-colored chains. At least nothing hanging from his ears or piercing his nose. No scars scratched onto his face like some cosmetic hex. How could that be attractive? Hardy hurried on instead of watching where the fellow went when he finally had his handful. The homeroom of his father boasted a bigger charity box than the others. It held hundreds of lemons once. Brought out year after year like a lawnmower. The box was married — but just — to a lid buckshotted with little holes. Its regular reuse enabled the room to maintain a measured kind of gift giving, a steady match of one Christmas with another, Hardy’s father said, though he was forgetting inflation. Everybody drowned in a sea of sympathy. An entire town smothered in molten lava. The track of the tornado. F4. Wind whistle. No one in Africa has food. Even the stones are starving. Hardy knew his parents liked to watch the box being unpacked, can by jar, mitten by glove, bag by carton. As a surprise, there’d be a toy ingeniously repaired. She lifted her bare foot free of the cloth lifted her bare foot free lifted her bare foot. Gee. Oh gee, “…and would like you to consider helping me at this time.” That guy hadn’t looked as if he lived on a Metro grate. And if he were an African with a smidge of sense, he’d never wear any kind of chain. But they didn’t think things through, did they? This guy lived so much for show he wouldn’t even pretend to be stricken and shabby. More gun butt than pan handle. How Hardy disliked D.C. The homeless were everywhere. Passing the time. That was all. Waiting like plants for a little sun a period of rain a rewarding response. In Santa Monica it was the beach, the Palisades with all those fruit trees, but in Washington it was the plethora of public buildings that drew them, the many benches in Union Station where they were rarely run off because bigwigs didn’t take the train. In Santa Monica they were nuts and bolts. The nuts talked to their reflections in store windows. The bolts waited till you got near and then ran. Ran in an alley. Ran into a vacant lot. Made you feel like a fucking leper or the local dick. Here they looked cold and old whatever age and lay rolled in snaggy blankets on grates and museum lawns. In Santa Monica they were fed by the city and without urging would sometimes gather in groups to chat, occasionally blocking paths and walks. Many of them had been nuts from their first Sunday. Don’t make eye contact was the word to the wise. In the window a soulmate would be similarly gesticulating. See me see you seeing me. How did they like the way their stew was served on those loopy paper plates? Where a brown liquid ran from beneath the carrots potatoes beef like a primeval seep. He hoped his soup was okay though containered by a dented can. “I am a negro male senior citizen trying to cope with the following problems: 1.” ONE. Hardy hated an empty day. Sundays. Below him, he could see souls on their stroll to church where a minister would try to make sexless love sound attractive to rows and rows of continuous semishiny seats. Sunshine on the caramel carpet. Bare brown walls. Otherwise empty streets. Sunshine on cement. Silent but for bells. Sunday, day of good deeds, the homeless were fed a hot meal at the city hall. Cardboard sign, nailed to a pole in Palisades Park, said so. D.C. was installing new hoop-shaped grates even a contortionist wouldn’t find comfy. Where would they go when the seasons neared cold? There’d be Santas standing by grocery-store doors. Ringing a red bell. Rattling a worn clapper. Dang. Tending a red pot suspended from a tripod. Dang. Every damn day of the week. Dang. Those bells, Hardy thought, had lost their dings and had no dongs. It helped him to think that. So Hardy would go elsewhere and take his refusals with him — in effect, boycott the entire chain. That would teach them. But how forlorn and futile the single gesture always was. Still, show some guts. Never cross a pleader’s line. Pots the size of sandbox pails. Because it was empty, Sunday seemed so large. By eleven, everyone inside their suits and silks, listening to the Lord’s word, singing hymns with no names but numbers. Waiting for the gimme plate. Is that why singers said: I’m going to sing a little number…? Hymn forty-nine. Convict ten-oh-three. Hardy remembered reading about the dinky fridges the English cooled their ardors in. Like seeing the picture of a pygmy before you saw one in a sideshow. Couldn’t store a lot, nothing large, consequently you didn’t buy a lot, nothing large, didn’t buy a lot because you couldn’t shop with a car unless you could find a place to park which you couldn’t, so you shopped every morning if you were a missus, you just walked to the store pushing the baby buggy sometimes, sometimes with a baby in it, visiting first a dinky butcher shop for red meat, internal organs, and muscular chicken before going on to where a clutch of bins were bunched on the sidewalk heaped with big sprouts and bigger beets and bigger yet cabbages to stuff and stretch your string bag, proceeding then to a dinky bakery to purchase tea cakes and tea buns and tea sweets and devil’s foods whose frosting was hard as plaster, all the while making time with the butcher, the dry goods chap, or the sweetmeat dearie, passing the morning like a gassy emission, parking the kid in a braked pram outside the shop but in any weather — the fresh air was good for all and sundry — so the tot’s slobber froze on his slobbered cheeks and made him look healthy forever because he, or — worse — she, soon wore little networks of faint red capillaries to prove she was…they were…well…to prove they were hardy: that was the series of connections — the chain — what was it called? — the chain of inconvenience which held the society together, since it was your semidetached house with its annoying shrunken spaces that made you shop every morning, consequently requiring everyone to get to know everyone, neighbors very much in the neighborhood of one another, chatting away like chickens, hence everyone carried a string bag and tried to be genial, trudging from counter to counter with big British change that weighed too much for a pocket to hold for long — pence in the pants — so that even men, imagine, had to carry a purse and a wadded thing of string just to buy cigs; nor could a customer cut the connections and free itself by purchasing a big two-door Sub-Zero flown in from America even though it wouldn’t fit against any wall except the one in the parlor, because you wouldn’t be able to carry home enough potatoes lard and fish to fill it, on account of your car was of no use to you if you had to park it by the greengrocer’s or by the baker’s or by the fishmonger’s and by the hosier too. The fact was that these various dink-sized things, spaces, human routines were knotted together very like string sacks imported from the Third World to make a social net, a net veined much like the ones he’d seen on a score of ruddy cheeks riding the Underground, the owners of the cheeks carrying bags openly abulge with cheap-peep purchases — this resemblance had impressed Hardy. The fact took residence in his mind where it served as a kind of universal pattern — a grid — to arrange his insight into things. A vast set of shabby supportive circumstances surrounded every newswrapped sleeper or pimp-appareled beggar or unwed widow with dollybaby at her bosom huddled at the door of a church to break your heart. He’d been accosted in New York by a trim earlymiddleaged lady several shades from plain — she had spotted him like a Shriner on the street — sir — always sir, as if he’d been knighted — well, hell, he was known to have helped deserving needy persons in the past — sir, she said — and then entered her spiel as if his slowing step had been a rising curtain. She needed money to get to Yonkers. Seven seventy-eight was what she needed, was with tax, the fare. His fingers failed of ten and gave her five, though afterward, walking away in shame in humiliation in a rage that reddened his face, he wished he’d counted out just the seventy-eight cents to help her evenly on her way. Coward. Lily-livered. Wuss. The Tree of Lights Campaign always fell short and was never declared over until February. Hardy’s idea of how to lure new businesses to town was to promise that the Community Chest would leave them alone. Solicitations by phone: at noon, at six, when you’d be home. Someone on the other end pretending to be an old friend from the class of ’88. For the honor of our Class. This phonathon’s for dear old Alma, my second mother. Mother of my law degree. Listen, old pal, I didn’t see a quad, a tree, a lawn, my many years in school — I saw only columns of the law, walls of heavy books, I saw only cheese crackers under fluorescent light, pages of opinion almost as blanched as bleached jeans — mock this, mock that — heard Jewish jokes. My class comprised scores of grinders just like me, as well as a few liberated ladies repeatedly unscored upon. Lived in a lousy little lightless room. Sat through stultifying lectures. Read boring books — boring boring books. And after all that got a so-so job. Don’t Alma mother me. He should have given her exactly seventy-eight cents. If she wanted to pretend to precision that would serve her lying tongue right, to round her sum off and ruin its verisimilitude for the next sucker, though having the seventy-eight pennies she wouldn’t plead for a simple seven smackers, would she? He still wished his tin hadn’t had a dent in it. A nice man just gave me seventy-eight cents so now all I need from you, sir, is seven bucks to get me back to Yonkers. Yet who would stoop to it — solicit, beg, entreat — who didn’t need to? There, in front of all eyes, on a public street? Still, only he — sap Hugh sap Hamilton sap Hardy — had met her eye. Otherwise their entire transaction was invisible as perfect servants were supposed to be. True charity was anonymous, wasn’t it? Handing her the tenner, no it was the fiver, he and she turned into two stones in a stream, and pedestrians passed around them the way they stepped over sleepers on the stairs to the Metro. Noli me tangere wasn’t something Latin from the law. This seeyounot hearyounever training was transcribed in the genes and, paradoxically, transmitted by sperm that touchedyounowhereyouknewabout. Molly was not an appropriate name for the Cleopatra whose breasts she permitted him to heft. A holy office. Raising the fatty chalice to his lips. The Salzburg Seminar wanted him to support it, the Folger ditto. Anywhere you had ever been became an endangered place; everything you did incorporated itself as a not-for-profit foundation in need of funds; every Cause followed you with open envelope. Dear sir…sir. She offered herself — should he say? — fulsomely. Hardy waited for the last kid to dump his donation but the last kid didn’t budge, humiliation held him in his seat, he had no gift, he said, for the hungry homeless poor, he hadn’t because…because he’d just forgot. Forgot the hungry homeless shabby needy poor. Well, that’s all right. Just bring something useful tomorrow. The kid’s red hair tried to creep under his scalp. Hardy had no name for him. Just kid. He remembered the brand of his soupy beans but not the name of the crestfallen kid who had embarrassed the class with his embarrassment. Van Camp’s. Help me through my struggle. In his first job Hardy had worked for Hemline Associates, a big outfit, big enough to hold a whole building captive, in an office park surrounded by grass green as money. Hemline had sent Hardy abroad for his first time — to England to match the English sneer for sneer. At sneering he’d been a failure. He couldn’t give looks. Giving was a significant thing at Hemline, part of your job, a definite expectation, Hardy found out, when he didn’t turn in his promissory note to the United Way. It would have come out of his pay. As automatic as an electric eye, his bank account would open its arms. Like the seeing-eye door at the market where a padded Santa would stand, ting-a-ling-linging, giving you a stare-you-down stare. Hardy was metaphorically dumbfounded: here was a commercial fiction’s fake representative giving you the once-over as you prepared to give a business your business — outrageous! you were the real creature after all — you weren’t a shabbily costumed bad actor in a stupid play — and giving you the twice-over when you left. Once. Twice. Over. Not even Santa’s red stomach was real. The belt was of cheap shiny vinyl. Donk donk went the ding-a-ling’s bell. Hardy remembered the pennies which bad luck that day had brought him, and how heavily they weighed in his pocket; how he had received four cents in change when he paid for a magazine, four more on account of a small packet of staples and four from a frozen dinner, it wasn’t fair, they bumped against his leg as if he were carrying a cosh made from coins, precious metals in a sock. Good idea. To clobber professional accosters on their noggins. Here’s your money, dummy. They rang your bell, made you come to the door. Held your home up. Preyed upon your politeness. So they could rant, presume, even pray, while pretending to chat on your front steps as if they were leaving a party. Confronters. Beggars of attention. In pairs like police: one black one white. Halo-hoopers. Petitioners with clipboards as if they held the Tablets of the Law. A good cause is always a good excuse. Walkathoners. They…the profiteers of philanthopyl…they’ll make use of anybody, children too, who skip rope in relays for hours to repair the sad plights of unwanted babies as though the bastards were rips in a coat. Trick or Treat runs through the same extortionist routine. Nowadays the kiddies offer you riddles older than the Nile — what’s black and white and red all over? — presents that you, donning a clown’s jolly surprised smile, reward with sweets bought in bags at the SuperStore: dwarfed bars of preserved glucose that coat the riddlers’ stomachs and ruin their preteen teeth — that was meager comfort — instead of suffering the soaped windows of former times or the absence of patio furniture that’s been hoisted without malice but for your inconvenience atop your porch roof. The chain had almighty many links, always: the candy manufacturers, for instance, who had captured Valentine’s Day and had a leg up on Easter, sold during the weeks approaching their designated holy days enough sugar to make a capitalist of Cuba. If you gave a kid a healthy apple he might shit on your stoop in disappointment and revenge. You turn the trick, dear, and I’ll enjoy the treat. Darkies came in dreadful droves to mug the smug in their suburban enclaves. They didn’t even costume up or anything, just collected candy, keeping the economy healthy, their presence menace enough; what would we do without the poor to engage the gears? Yet what have we left them? Only a sweet tooth with which to bite down on their stale little pittance. A bit peanuttery, wasn’t it? Hardy remembered the riddles and prepared an appropriate riposte: a nun, a chef, and a fireplug. Through eyeholes, down false noses, the kids stared at your answer as if at a bulldog. The worst doorknock nuisances were those prissily dressed pairs (white boy black girl) who wanted you to listen to their religious spiel, who requested the precious gift of their time, your attention, and received instead the absence of your mind and the anger of your soul. Nigerians have those wide noses, don’t they? Splayed, but no nostril hair, never see hair there. Cowed. He’d been cowed. In Naples in Rome crowds of gypsy children crowd round you at the railroad station trying to steal your bags or your purse or your wallet or the package under your arm while you are hunting for lire to fit into all those grimy aggravating fists; thin-fingered they are, pale-faced though swarthy, greedy and grinning, inevitably skinny and in clothes patched from here to there, but dancy and darty, shifty-eyed and slick. Hardy was reminded of the insatiable appetite of squirrels. She didn’t shave under her arms, was rather proud of the black thatches that enlivened her nudity. Matisse-ish. No. Modigliani. Ish. Long hair on ladies, Hardy thought, was a gift because it took some taking care of. Short-haired women weren’t much for the giving business, in Hardy’s opinion. Only interested in Easy Maintenance. In Maintaining a Masculine Image or the Business Woman Look. I’ll do you if you do as you’re told, Molly always said, with a smile like she’d already had her satisfaction. Once women wore layers of fat to be pleasing, were ample and rolling like verdant meadows and soft plump mattresses on pillowed beds. Warmly redundant. Like reciting Our Father in church. Dundant. The organ moaned an Offertory, a saucer-shaped basket would pass and mostly envelopes would fill it. Nothing so vulgar as a bill to prime the plate like hatcheck chicks line a glass so you could see what you should do. Beggars were apportioned — in Florence, in Pisa — one to a doorway. In Bologna, Hardy believed, charity was better managed because the Communists didn’t permit poverty. In a just society compulsory generosity would be unnecessary. But our society was just social. According to the church, giving gave you good luck and a Christian blessing. Of some sort. Hardy wasn’t able to believe in a deity precisely because of creation’s constant need for charity. Well, he felt bad about the boy who hadn’t brought — maybe couldn’t afford — wasn’t allowed — a donation, so the next day he filched a can of asparagus tips from the Hardy larder and tried to give it to what-was-his-name? its label said Le Sueur, before homeroom convened, but the kid — what-was-its-name? fancy French — Le Sueur, let’s say — shook his nameless lankhaired head, wouldn’t take Hardy’s offering, dashed off, clearly unstuck from his seat. Disappeared around a corner like a sparrow who’s heard a cough or a footstep on the gravel. Turned truant, Hardy was told. Were there a good god, there’d be no needy, Hardy’s wise high school head said. Hardy felt worse about the shame than the truancy. Shame was like a sun rising inside you, wet and steaming from the sea. You grew warm, oddly feverish, your heart beat so fast it began to sweat, maybe it was like a hot flash, camera popping off to light your dark insides. And observing, sharing someone’s embarrassment — secondhand shame — also brought blood to the cheeks. Was it the same blood, he wondered, that gave you an erection or was it blood from a different section of the system? Burn always with a bright shame-like flame. Yeah. He’d heard or he’d read. Eat from each edge. Flames meeting in the middle. One consuming the other. So giving charity or getting it: which did more harm? It certainly perpetuated problems, rewarded failure, indolence. How to keep the homeless homeless: feed them. Let them lie about on the warm sand, sleep in moist warm sea air, stare at the ocean until it turns into dream. Bless our happy homeless state. Hardy was in a happy homeless state, wasn’t he? His apartment was as empty as a sunny Sunday. In any case, how much good got done? Were some givers given God’s grace as a consequence of their giving, or did they need God’s grace in order to give in the first place? He’d read that most of the money these charities collected went to the administrators of the business. To buy little red soldier suits and a tambourine, or to dress deadbeats up as Santas. Only a little found its way to the poor, the sick, the diligent researcher, the ill-favored poet in his garret, the painter supported only by his easel, the cold-fingered composer who’s had to pawn his ivories, feeding dog food to his famished genius till it barks, and music blares out the horn of the speaker. All that the Boy and Girl Scouts did when they went scouting, as far as Hardy could see, was solicit for the scouts. Badges ought to be awarded for cookie sales and raffles. Hi. I’m Heather. I live down the street. Would you like to order some Girl Scout cookies? What kinds do you got, sis? Raisin oatmeal as always, I dunno, chocolate chip, of course, I guess, everybody’s favorite, looking a lot like oatmeal raisin, ginger peachie it’s called, I think, this year they promised to bake some of that hardasnails butterscotch. Hardy remembered peppermint with a certain fondness. Some would be so young their moms would have to follow in a car like FBIs tailing an actress. Apartments wouldn’t let them in — one advantage of high-rise life. Except for the families in residence who roamed the corridors howling like Indians. KIDS AND PETS NOT ALLOWED was a utopian policy which had to be disavowed on account of those cowards in Washington, where Hardy, he was ashamed to say, lived, so he could enjoy being annoyed with his neighborhood, disgusted with his city, embarrassed by the country and its lascivious citizens — whose undisciplined offspring loved to button up and down on the elevators, to pester your floor, play hide and seek, and, fueled by giggles, race the halls until they located your poorly protected pad, where they would rap as resoundingly as the concierge you had given up expecting though the tap still dripped. At fifteen, at his home then on Greenleaf Street, Hardy would have to answer the door — Mom and Dad had sworn off that chore because — they lied — on the other side might be a complaining parent come to confront Dad with a D he alone had awarded and a D that would keep their stupid little squit out of Dartmouth—“answer the door” was the expression, as if it had asked, as if its deadbolt had made such a declaration…ah! and meet Heather — too undeveloped to be dated — standing on the stoop, but not dressed in her little Girl Scout skirt, or in her wide green sash where the medals were pinned, instead in a sack suitable for five-year-old grannies, sewn from a pattern better used to tile a floor. Hardy couldn’t put a stopper on his youthful condescension (a more sincere if unmerited assumption of superiority), and inevitably succumbed to the temptation to tease. Where’s your uniform, Heather, how do I know you’re a scout without your uniform? She had an official paper in her hand. This was thrust in his face. Hey, he said, without your uniform you’re not a scout, and without your skirt you’re not a girl you’re a granny. Her other hand held a folder depicting plates of garish-colored cookies in restful circumstances. The folder slipped open and flapped shut. Hardy laughed loudly and honestly at her. The stupid girl’s mum gave his mom a complaining call, and soon both mothers were furious with a fury that flowed from them in fiery pinwheeling rings. They’d have to stop answering the phone or reading their mail, his parents said, and hard-ear any kind of question coming from the public sector. Hardy had hated scouts ever since…ever since Heather. Voice recorders were invented specifically to protect those who had fled to apartments to avoid salesmen, because now it was the phone that rang, not the front-door bell—“answer the phone” was the operative phrase — whereupon a heavily accented voice would try to give you something. As soon as Hardy heard the words “Congratulations, you’ve—” he’d hang. Or the phone would go deeple deeple deeple so Hardy’s recorded voice could repeat: “This is Hugh Hamilton Hardy, I am sorry I cannot come to the phone right now but please leave a message after the tone and I’ll get back to you”; whereupon a mechanical clone, turning a tin ear to his dismally conventional apology, would wonder whether Hugh was sure Hamilton was sufficiently insured by Hardy. Such solicitude from a machine should extract a tear from a hinge. However, Hardy loved the firemen’s magical formula “weir raisin sum muny for the orfans.” Raisin. Like bringing up baby. Or a ship from the depths. She would redden sometimes in the space between her breasts; he would praise her; she would shy a smile and run his hands through her hair. The firemen would infest intersections, holding boots up to your nose, if you’d been foolish enough to slow down while enjoying an open window. These were slicker-yellow boots into whose depths you were expected to cast coins of a number sufficient to rattle pellymelly on the way down since the firemen were always jiggling them as if absent legs were feeling a bit of bladder pressure and needed to water a garden. In Hardy’s Midwest hometown, its admirable but underpaid defenders had gone on strike, and, in order to emphasize the public’s need for their protection, had burned down a couple of empty buildings. Well, they weren’t all empty. A pair of tramps got scorched. They burned — the buildings — very slowly, and many people came to contemplate their consummation. In Prague, because his window overlooked the street, Hardy had watched a master at work. A man, slightly portly, just past middle age, dressed neatly and rather formally, in tie, hat, and sweater worn like a vest, would come every midmorning to a slight indentation in the old buildings which so solidly lined the street, and fitting himself in a niche would simply stand in solemn impassivity with one open hand held at the side of his chest into which an amazing amount of small bills and change were deposited by passersby to whom he said not a word, nor did he wink or bow or smile. The hand would fall into his coat pocket and just as mechanically rise again, empty now, to resume its very discreet petitioning. That hand, so naturally positioned, could almost have been held where he held it as if it were being held there in idleness, without prior purpose. I am gentry, his dress, his expression, his posture said. I clearly don’t need your money. Nor shall I try to elicit your sympathy by looking forlorn in any way; you’ll hear not a word of whining, I’ve no sad story; you’ll catch nary a look of anxiety or remorse, an imploring gesture; nor shall I close my fist on your florin, as if in a hurry, nor show, by bob or nod or bless you, some sign of appreciation. Hardy would slowly kiss her cute feet: toe one, toe two, toe three…She would grow moistly abundant. Resplendent, the thigh skin, stretching away to the mount. He thought just then of the Mount of Olives. Absurd the adventitious bridges between words. Yet it was astonishing how a sacrifice, a catastrophe could comprise a gift. After Cans for Kids had come and gone, the carton would remain in a corner of the classroom, flaps up, waiting for its gaps to close. Indent. New paragraph. “1. A wife suffering chronic osteoporosis for five years.” It was notable that after the salutation “Dear Sir,” there was a period incorrectly bestowed, whereas at the end of the presumably heart-tuggy phrase “I am a senior citizen trying to cope,” there was a colon, properly disposed to herald the oncoming list of tribulations: “1. A wife…” The typing, too, was flawless, and a local address was placed at both top and bottom of the page: upper right, then lower left below the signature, a Lemuel not a Gulliver but someone Tugge. Jeez. Lemuel Tugge. Really? He’d been — lawyer Hardy had — denied the services of a secretary because, as at Hemline, he was repeatedly on-the-road, in-the-plane, appearing-in-offices-all-over-the-world with his case and his pale almost painted smile, faint as those mural figures that have faded on the flaking wall of an ancient church in dingy Sicily, his purpose in suddenly showing up to quietly consternate a deadbeat, a behindhand supplier, an unfair competitor, a patent thief, a malingerer, a physician who was practicing imaginary medicine. Hardy’s passivity was perfect, he’d been told — although it hadn’t gotten him a raise in two years due to tough times, he’d been also told — because it was not subservient or cautious or lacking in oomph, but gave off an aura of calm confidence and certainty about the legal, if not the moral, superiority of his position, a nimbus which could have come from nothing but a clear and steady we’ll-wheel-you-into-suicide point of view, accompanied by a softly polished face, a cuff and color odor as seductively alluring as perfume from a scratch patch, yet a posture exhibited by the suit that resembled, in representing the claimant’s attitude, a volcanic cone only momentarily covered with cooling snow. He had been left holding the can, so he put the peas — or was it corn? asparagus? — on top of the sack like an uneasy crown. Its presence was remarked the next day because during the night, Hardy supposed, it had toppled to the floor and rolled a short distance into a very prominent middle-of-nowhere. Miss Rudge merely swooped it up without a word and dropped it through a sack’s ruffled throat. In contrast, Hardy’s dad was aware of every open spot in his collection. Consequently, when laggards made up for their tardiness with late deposits he immediately took notice of them. Ah. Someone has had the kind consideration to bring us nearer to our goal, Dad the Good Samaritan would loudly announce. Splendid! More of such thought, if taken, will put us in the pink. The pink. Yes. Of extended palm. Hardy had to hurry off to his own homeroom where Miss Rudge effectively ignored her charitable assignment — Hardy was happy about that — so her solicitations scarcely filled two skinny paper bags. She picked up and plop-dropped his can of peas — beans — as mechanically as a sweeper. Miss Rudge’s seniors didn’t have to have Santas pasted to the twenty-four panes of their windows. They didn’t have to have paper chains looped above the blackboard as though something above had given way. Seniors didn’t have to make Christmas greetings for loved ones out of Magic Marker, doilies, and art card. They were grateful for their seniority. But they still had to contribute to Cans for Christmas. They still had to pledge their allegiance. No indent. New paragraph. “2. A grown daughter diagnosed as a manic depressive after an auto accident.” Maybe, Hardy thought, he should offer to take her case on a split-the-settlement basis. Illnesses itemized. The sums required were accurately estimated and efficiently summed. Amazing. Nevertheless not unlike the exactitude of the lady from Yonkers. Which offered itself as a model. The letter was neatly typed and professional except for the dot after “Dear Sir.” Personalized. “Dear”—meaning cherished? meaning pricey? meaning loaded? “Dear Sir.” On some: “Dear Sir or Madam.” Signed with just the right amount of incompetence. But a copy nevertheless, as his wet thumb drawn across the signature proved. Not even the suggestion of a smear. I need a secretary because, although I can walk into a Prague or Padua or Paris office and terrify the paperclips simply by saying hello and unsnicking my slick black briefcase, shiny as Mephistopheles’s mirror, I can’t face down a scheming beggar on the street. Coward yellow-livered coward. What did his correspondent want? Black too, called himself a Negro (yes, caps) (oHh the shrewdness of that nomenclature), well, this negro needed money to buy a house. A house. Hardy didn’t have a house. He lived alone in a bare-walled caramel-carpeted apartment on New Hampshire. Where he met Molly. Who also lived conveniently by, in a building of the feminine gender. Where, after inviting him up, she stood barefoot on his back in front of an open window. Don’t you dare look up my cunt or I’ll trampoline your spine. She was slim as a hipped stick, still…her weight made him feel light. And durable. Even though his position was appropriate for the weak. Hardy let his cheek lie against the cool unshaven rug. He knew his passivity was regularly misconstrued. One could not insist too strongly: passivity was his strong suit. But it was — well, if not quite an act, an adoption — like a lie once told you are stuck with — a stray taken in — so you frequently have to add to it, feed it, elaborate on it, currycomb it and live by it. Day after day, on and on — prolonged. His penis would struggle to grow in the no-space between rug and belly. Worth putting up with because in a bit she’d step off and straddle, her feet like hugging hands against his ribs. Then Hardy would be allowed to turn over and look up. If that’s what it took, take it, that was his motto; and right now it was a living, though he was weary of airports and the boredom of business class, the self-inflating chat of his fellow travelers, their predictable complaints, sly self-compliments, lies they had overtold by now until they were a part of history, bastards whom hope has made legitimate, and in his passive mode, in practice for his arrival in Providence or Buffalo, he’d listen, or rather nod, chewing airline chips to create a munch of protective static to insert between his ears and the babble of his seatmates. The garrulous travelers were not soothing the way a fountain soothes. They weren’t squirting water at the sky and pretending to make rain, a rain so controlled it drew amusing pictures, pittypatters on the plane of the pool…Hardy emerged a moment from his reverie. His thoughts were being detoured, but the detours were odd because there was nothing under construction. Not plop — plap. That was the sound the dimes and pennies made when tossed by well-wishers into the basin where at least the copper glittered, a bowl cleverly designed to keep the donations at a depth deeper than a thievish arm, so that once or twice a month a man in fireman’s boots and a hand rake, or in sandals if the pool had been drained, would skiddle or wade about collecting coins for what would be advertised as a charity — Children Without Stuffed Animals — some such — teddy bears for kids that cancer was killing, therefore comforts that could be recycled — a thought that made Hardy smile out his window at the university students hurrying through the streets to destinies much like his, though how many girls would grow up to have their toes kissed: toe one, toe two, toe five; or how often would a guy get the gift of a fleece like hers, ebonized, abundant, such as the long fall of hair that splashed over her shoulders, curled as though waiting to be wound around a finger? Hardy had a slow smile, he’d been told, one that scarcely cracked and barely widened during those silences which served, for him, as the customary response to a plea, and excuse, even a bluster, a smile that grew like a tree ring till his teeth finally showed, and continued on, at the close of the client’s or the distributor’s or the competitor’s explanation, to open in a loopy grin of disbelief, genuine because Hardy was always surprised by the excuses his…well…targets thought up; their fabrications amazed him, the apologies they proffered left him gaga. No wonder the company never considered its suppliers, its contractors, its customers, doctors or their patients to be anything but liars, dishonorable deadbeats, incompetent crooks — multimalfeasors, his boss liked to say, multimals — consequently, Hardy (his calling card read: HUGH HAMILTON HARDY, RECEIPTS ATTORNEY, HEALTH AND HAVEN INDUSTRIES) was never cast in any role other than that of the Enforcer — Receipts Attorney indeed — his warm round innocently open face like a Gatling gun going off in a paneled office, no coffee from Sumatra thank you I’ve already had breakfast, no scotch from Glenquaritch thank you it’s too early for me, no water from Vichy either thank you all the same I don’t smoke so shall we solve our little problem now since I know your time is valuable, time is more than money it is life itself, our hours even minutes are, so yours must be. I’m (softly said) sure. I’m sure. Hardy presented himself as a man with no needs and no concern for politeness. Not that he was rude. Against his rules. There was never any reason to be rude. Brisk not brusque, efficient not inconsiderate. As a response to his adversary’s hospitality, in reply to pleasantries, Hardy would return a quiet confident word of warning, offer a pithy phrase of god-fatherly advice, a sentence set down like a sentence from the bench in place of the glass of Vichy on a doily or a cork coaster, a coaster so the glass wouldn’t sweat where sweat wasn’t wanted, coastered where the rocked scotch might have sat, or a cup of fresh and steaming Kona could have rested: beverages chosen to call attention to the company’s taste, drunk to encourage a comfortable climate, placed to promote a sense of shared values, where instead Hardy’s black brief smugly threatened. The niceties were nice enough though they — alas — did nothing for the supplier’s lack of promptitude, nothing to alleviate the deep disappointment their corporation had inflicted upon those who had counted on reliable deliveries, or a certain level of quality in the product, or the promised performance of a drug or an instrument; who moreover suffered from the inconceivable inaccuracies in the offending company’s catalogue, with its pages of barren boasts, the flagrancies of its invoices, its evasive personnel, its grudging responses; so, under the circumstances, Hardy saw no way to slow or soften Health and Haven’s insistence upon mutually agreed guarantees which, were they not promptly honored, XYZ Plastics — the End-of-Alphabet Company’s presently miserable business — would surely suffer final disaster, almost immediately feel the serious impact of just and proper punishments: ill will, loss of custom on account of damaging rumors and other dirty words of mouth, lawsuits, dumping, infiltration, fines, raids, maybe a takeover followed by sell-offs, foreclosures, bankruptcy…and eventually, after futile but expensive payments to lawyers, there would be an unpleasant trial concluding with prison and, therein, a long stay. Perhaps XYZ’s CEO would one day be writing Hardy one of those begging letters that were finding their way into his apartment’s mailbox. Hardy took time out seriously to wonder this, not aloud, of course, or as an oblique way of suggesting such a fate for himself, since, face-to-face, he never doubted his cause. His inner rightness glowed like the word of God…glowed. What Hardy liked about business was that in business nothing was known of charity. It was, in that sense, a genuine world. There were only — sometimes — projects undertaken to cultivate goodwill, because goodwill and a Samaritan appearance were both cash crops. “I’ve labored my entire life to be self-supporting and am embarrassed to have to ask for help because of the desperate need for money.” “I have been fighting my battles for three years now without a break.” “My physical condition is improving but my finances are completely gone.” “My husband’s job folded in January this year. He’s still seeking permanent employment.” “I was really having major problems breathing to the point on May 13th, 1996, my father carried me to the hospital because I was collapsing every thirty minutes while walking, cooking, doing anything.” “Sold my home in 1993 to support family needs.” “I am a retired Army enlisted person crippled in both legs, both arms, and I have osteoarthritis in my upper spine.” During the time Hardy’s head was being filled with pleas, he looked the beleaguered company officer right in the eye. Which he couldn’t do when confronted by a faceless page. Implacability would invade his gaze, as if his eyes were watering from some irritation. In the middle of his whites was the big blue sky like a bullet hole in a paper target. Hardy’s boss was decent, an older man, beginning to fatten, show gray, who had reached the stagnant level of his skills, and who, therefore, could never be advanced if management were to continue to be shrewd. He was a lawyer, too, but hired by the company to protect its interests. He was supposed, like a house dick, to keep the peace, and, at a distance, the police. But in the day-to-day of his vocation he resembled a ship’s doctor, those architects whom contractors hire, or chemists who contrive perfumes or find ways, selectively, to kill weeds, encourage seeds, entice rain, grow wormless fruit. And, under him, Hardy had a similar function: enforcer for the H & H family. He was proudly aware of the comparison and how well he matched it. It even, one could say, monitored his heart. Yes…Hardy was well paid. Sellouts usually sold out for something. Yes…Hardy was good at his job. But sellouts lost faith in themselves, then lost will and were no longer effective. Hardy hadn’t, had he? felt a weakening of confidence or commitment. So he wasn’t a sellout, was he? Once, Pilip, his boss, Greg Pilip, had asked him — Hardy had just completed a résumé of one of his journeys — yes, it had been after a long and arduous trip to Prague to confront a company which had agreed to supply Health and Haven downlike comforters for their chain of Golden Homes — the down count was in question — and as a form of conclusion, between them, between the Boss and his Bully Boy, as after sex, there had occurred a moment of relaxation during which time Greg (as he was just then) had wondered: Do you know of…he had asked him did he ever hear of a gangster in the twenties whose name was Baby Face Nelson? Hardy hadn’t, but the question sent him to the Net and its miniature biographies. Soon Hardy became acquainted with the Karpis gang, Ma Barker and Machine Gun Kelly, Dillinger and Capone; he saw Clyde die in a car that would consequently sport a hundred bullet holes; thus he witnessed Clyde die in more indomitable condition, on account of that, than a tattered flag. But he was a gangster of the thirties, a bandit for Depression times, and certainly unsuitable for the more exuberant twenties. In any case, he would never have corrected his Boss over one measly decade. The belief that Hardy was Billy the Kid and Baby Face Nelson, if not rolled into one at least identically twinned, had secured his job once he had obtained it, but the combination in his person of the two outlaws also guaranteed he’d be frozen at his present level, because such a skill — he believed management thought — had a limited market, and further, that if he were moved up — promoted for muscularity as a strong arm — his strength, when employed to push pencils, would be largely wasted; though as Boss he might effectively terrorize his Bully Boys into realizing their own inner belligerency, still…would that be the best use of Hardy’s rare and inexplicable talent? His talent, few knew, was for docility, not a real docility which might be lazy and intermittent and taken for granted, but one which was the object of enterprise and effort, and therefore was always finding fresh submissions designed to delight, and subtle gestures of idolatry that, for instance, could convince Molly that Molly’s calves were golden. O she did so want to believe! The wondrous length of her leg made Hardy’s mouth pretend to water, though it did water, so where was the pretense? A lot of his life was like the line his tongue took toward its goal: eager yet enacted, planned but passionate, urgent therefore slow and deliberate. The important thing was, she felt his touch, his tongue’s tip. Or did she? Perhaps she simply read his kisses and responded to their meaning, completing the circuits of excitement through her head instead of through her skin? Whatever, as our children say today. Hardy had a hunch — he clung to it — it was his only hope — that other companies might covet his particular skills; after all, every one he’d visited, every firm whose duty he’d reminded their corporate conscience of, would be aware of his worth; of course, they’d not be so indiscreet about their own shortcomings as to mention him in that connection, so his methods might remain unheralded after all, even when they should have won him wide renown, and increased his value on the market. Hardy was puzzled. It was a problem. He was afraid he might be mispracticing his profession. The law wasn’t a gun to be held at someone’s head, was it? Because, in a way, his practice of the law was prelegal, prior to any filings, arguments in court, judgments, or jury findings. A similar quandary amazed his thoughts about Molly and her apparent pleasure in dominating him. It was, he believed, only theater. She was as free from commitment as a leaf in the wind. Molly was very male that way: to enjoy her enjoyment was her aim and end. Yet which one of them was really in charge? Because Hardy knew that if he groveled, if he bowed as if utterly to her will, Molly would melt, and he would soon have the pleasure of her having him, settling on him very slowly, the way someone sore might settle on a cushion, giving him nearly the only thing in life which sustained his self-esteem, and allowed him to expire in a sigh which would have signaled sleep if they’d been making out in his apartment. She would pretend to rise and find herself unable to; we appear to be screwed together, she would say, pressing him into her. Whenever Hardy did toe three, toe eight, toe ten, Molly would get the giggles and pound on the bed with her fists. I beg your pardon, sir, but I unfortunately find myself in a bit of a predicament. My purse was stolen on the train, and I need to get back home to a hungry child, yet here I am without the fare for a taxi, sir, you could surely spare seven seventy-eight. How to stare in silence as if to a stone. That’s all I need, I’ve asked that driver there what his price would be. How to brush by a pleasant person, so she seemed, with nary a reply, after she had sought him out in the crowd, spoken to him in such a sad and anxious way. Hey…I find myself in a predicament too. I am glued to my girlfriend. Her arms, which were holding her hands prayerfully together, rose like parallel beams to point in perfect unison at a Yellow idling near the curb. Like a fool Hardy fumbled for a fiver. Couldn’t be cold, couldn’t be big about it either. Hardy should have advised her to huddle in a doorway, put on an imploring face and hold her famished Yonkered tyke to her shriveled bosom; then seven seventy-eight in lire would spill like tears into the gray cloth of her lap where a few prechosen coins might already rest to signify charity’s chosen receptacle…and prime the pump the way hatcheck girls do, cigarette girls too, as well as the indicative flapped-over caps of sidewalk artists. And why, after he had fumbled up his fiver, hadn’t he hung around to see whether she would take her coconspirator’s cab? to catch her in her lie? why? whatever for? Because Hardy knew it was a fabrication, and she knew he knew, how could she not know, although it was a reasonable way to beg without begging exactly, since she would simply seem to be borrowing a precise sum for a specific purpose, in a natural fix, could happen to anyone at least once, moment by moment more mothers were being mugged on the Independent, even though the cab was pulling away without any passenger, just as Hardy was being washed down the avenue, borne on a stream of pedestrians who did not enjoy folks like rocks lying in their way, bumping him a bit about the elbows till he started slipping along himself, in tune, increasingly, to the flow of traffic, another mummm in the hum of New York life. While the beggarqueen was already down a block soliciting ten twenty-five to return to the Bronx. Please, sir. Please? They infested the intersections. They…they…how many?…multitudes. Sometimes little girls holding gaily creped boxes and wearing a hot weary sorrowful expression begged at the stoplight, raising a crayon-created cardboard sign to a car window where a sour-faced honky name of Hardy sat in his sedan staring sternly straight ahead and tried not to notice not to care if the Rainbow girls got to summer camp or wonder what work the wonk would do — as he had advertised — for food, or bother to count how many kids the fat lass had. Had had, and would have. Hardy had a hunch that more than once a few young men of no special connection hung about with tin cans to collect a little action money. Sometimes the kids were ethnically disadvantaged, tiny and teetery, likely to back into the path or the side of a car; it would happen one day and who would sue whom then? or complain in some D.C. city council meeting of being struck for racial reasons. Hardy approached such lights with extreme care, sliding the driver’s window up. He had learned to shrug like a pauper and smile at the approach of a paper-covered juice tin or shiny Crisco can. He imagined there’d be a problem getting the grease out: just how well were the pots washed? How well did they need to be? Or there would be a bevy of formidable black women peddling little sacks of chocolate candy that the candy company (enterprising as always) had especially bagged and tagged for sale by charities. They are turning the streets into toll roads, Hardy thought. Occasionally the solicitors were dressed in the uniform of some odd rip-off cult like what were they called? those alleged African Jews, Yah…Ben something…one of the lost tribes of Israel, the beggarly tykes’ mothers in white sheets and head wraps watching safely from a sidewalk, out of their own harm’s way, while their offspring handed out leaflets full of illiterate racist propaganda which would provide some bang for the sucker’s buck if he paid but otherwise remained wadded in the nongimme fist as if it would never be released…wah…yes…yahwah; but mostly it was black boys raising money to buy basketball uniforms, or those Korean cult creeps selling rosebuds — what a racket — or once in a while a woman willing to work for food to feed her get — like the Yonkers con — the sole support of her entire unfortunate famished family, their lives hanging by a threadbare thread. Hardy didn’t drive much, but he did object to being victimized, particularly when alone in his own locked and technically moving vehicle…One time the children wore white T-shirts with the words HELP US TO HELP OURSELVES printed on the back in black. The organizers had made an investment in T-shirts. Hardy was impressed. He admired flagrant honesty. They were going to help themselves to the money in his wallet. If people gave to the government a quarter of what they throw to the charitable scams as if they were tossing Mardi Gras beads into the trees we could buy better bulletproof vests for the police and undertake small local wars without being noticed by anybody not even the budget. Kept next to the heart in his regulation lawyer nonlinen nonseersucker suit he was required to wear the entire D.C. year even when Washington was hotter and wetter than the tropics. Entirely unfair. Secretaries swished about in dresses shorter than shorts and thinner than flimsies. Molly was amused when it poked its head from his bikini brief. Coast clear, it is supposed to ask. The youngsters were distributing leaflets — explaining themselves, Hardy guessed, informing all and sundry why this or that motorist ought to have shelled out, but offering the news only when, and well after, the motorist had…shelled. His curiosity awoke the second time he’d waited at that light (because life usually committed you, if to go…then to return) where he’d been opportuned by a tyke no taller than a yardstick; and this sad measurement provoked him into handing a dollar out his window to the length of an elbow. He received in smileless blessless thankless exchange a piece of poorly printed paper the size of an ordinary book page which he promptly tossed on the seat beside him and forgot. Though Hardy remembered now and then with a genuine shiver how once off FDR Drive just before the mouth of the Triborough Bridge he had been approached at a light by a thug with a brick and a squeegee — your window or your reward — and Hardy was indeed scared by the prospect, especially since the off-ramps were lined with burned-out cars — it was as if he had suddenly driven into an apocalyptic movie — when nearly in the nick of time the line lurched forward and Hardy’s windshield received only a squirt of something no wider or wetter than the spatter of a moth. Toe two…the little piggy that had roast beef?…can of baked beans with real molasses…tomato soup, very popular, homerooms would swap dupes…package of pasta, something of use…like kissing a big beard, the beard of a bearded lady…well, they all were…beard blessed…cellophane bag of marshmallows…her moan, he assumed, meant for him to go on…do more…jar of peanut butter, package of pudding mix…we shall grow old together, she predicted, pretending to be stuck…packet of tea bags, box of macaroni and cheese…toe ten. In D.C. if you were smart you stayed away from the edges of downtown, but he had not thought of riskiness that noon because he was simply walking through the fringe, so he had not thought about how foolish he was being although after all it was broad day and there were plenty of people around even if he was walking through the fringe and the people were mostly dregs and drearies, so what was there to think about? When ching-a-ching ching-a-ching jeezus right near Chinatown’s big fake gate the fancy-dancy boy with the wide white eyes drew his shoes up alongside and said with a grin made of steel teeth sir…so what do you do, she said smiling widely wonderfully at his — was it? — right ear, and something in Hardy said I go to dooz like this, that’s what I dooz, which turned her wide wonderful smile into an enchanting grin that defined her full-lipped mouth and made it impossible to imagine she was unattached, nor was she, as it turned out, as her eyes enlarged behind her wine, because like so many in the city of secretarial love, she was the plaything of a congressman’s aide — how was that for being near the center of power? — who, however, bored her and was only good for pop concert tickets, and who could be dumped with less than a moment’s notice if a real improvement could be offered, which he offered over and over in the next few days, clearly besotted, a condition she easily perceived and a state that didn’t do his case any harm since it was seen as a big improvement, because these secretaries were accustomed to being taken for granted and abused, driven by their ambitions to betray their bodies by lending them to men who, even naked, wore their suits, tight ties, and the arrogant faces of loan officers to the SleepEase of love, coming with no more sound than a rubber-soled shoe, though if their squeeze didn’t squeal, didn’t buck and sweat and play the whore, they grew mean. Once these stags got their balls racked, they skidded from bed like a book that’s fallen from sleepy hands, withdrew into their underpants and were soon quietly closing the apartment door, fleeing the hall as if the building were on fire. Hardy naturally thought of SleepEase because it was a company he’d had to threaten, their mattresses were some springs short. You must think our old people don’t move when they groove, he’d been inspired to say, this time to a lady too far down the pecking order for Hardy to be seeing on such a serious subject; it annoyed him a little so he was — in tune with his temper — a little rude. She was black to boot. How far down was that? Measure the inseam of that insult. Molly’s man came back for more, of course, but he rarely bothered to ask her out, which was what she was fucking him for — to be seen in the scene with her squire. So, for Hardy, it was a ripe time. He was lucky. Her beau, who didn’t know he had been xxx’d out, phoned a few times, discreetly rattled the knob of her door. Quietly: toe three…toe three…toe three. What’s that? It’s fureee. Let’s see. A leg languidly…lan guid ly…At the intersection this time stood the rose peddler. Invariably in nothing but bud, long-limbed, darkly, redly petaled, the stems were inserted into a plastic water-filled baggie, the baggies boxed, the box parked on a median strip where the TwiceSaved stood. Hardy wondered what their supposed price was, these posies sold by well-scrubbed kids no more Korean than Grandma’s cookies, not nearly as moony as he was, remembering her skin, her shoulders laden with hair, her rich-lipped grin. You don’t know how to crawl, she said. I’ll learn to squirm, Hardy had replied, holding her with a wink and a word as securely as dining out or disco did, his arms also in an enraptured twine. Hardy, however, was happy to take her out; he was proud to be seen with such a bust, and a smile that was bestowed on him like a promise; it made him proud because it made others envious. Hardy, unlike her other lovers, knew how to love her; he followed her desires the way a weathercock sniffs the wind. Hardy did dates, went to movies, held in the cinema’s semidark no more than her hand and kissed her slowly before they undressed, softly letting her lips encase his, appreciating their width (toe one), appreciating ears neck and shoulders, in no hurry (toe two), appreciating her feet and ankles (toe three), calves and even knees (toe four), appreciating the long sweet streets that were her thighs (toe five), really in no hurry; and these were appreciations Molly appreciated. Because he didn’t embarrass her with sitcom jokes such as How are the twins? To which she had learned to reply, Getting bigger every day. In public Hardy was polite and attentive. That’s all. It led her to think he Hardy was in love. Though Hardy would have traded her in for a secretary. “Your reputation as a person who has helped people like me in the past prompts me to ask you to consider helping me now. I write this letter in need of immediate assistance for a travel opportunity which has recently been offered to me.” “I understand you have helped people like myself in the past and I would like you to consider helping me at this time. I am a recently married young woman who is fighting for her life against cancer and debt.” “It is my understanding that you do consider helping people like me that have a plan but do not have the financial means to put it together.” “Hello. My name is Marvin R. Travertine. A little over six years ago my illness really started to take its toll. I was working all over the United States on our Hospitals, Major Electrical and Defense projects. I started having problems that intensified over five years to cause me to loose my business and work, to loose my wife and kids, to loose everything.” “Dear Sir or Madam: I understand you have helped people like myself in the past and I would like you to consider helping me at this time. I am a creative motivated minorities person with a lot of invention design idea’s, that need to be researched, developed and marketed for the consumer market.” “Your reputation as a person who has helped people like me in the past prompts me to ask you to consider helping me now. I recently lost my job and am unable to find another one because of age discrimination.” Just how long did Hardy think his baby-face would remain so threateningly fresh and cruelly innocent? He worried that his work was leading him into a dead end. What he was learning, he worried, was not useful. Whatever he was honing had no future. Like a girl he examined his fresh face for signs of lines, laxness at a level just below the skin. What if he did become the perfect pickle fork? Pickle forks were on their way out; they were being replaced by colored toothpicks for God’s sake. Hardy couldn’t help himself. What was SleepEase thinking? What was SleepEase thinking? To sic a secretary on him. A rank insult. Though they did replace their sleazy sleepmaps, he remembered. So whatever it took he’d take, including humiliation. Maybe he could buy one of those T-shirts he’d seen and wear it for Molly. HELP ME TO HELP MYSELF. She’d pretend to scream with glee. Hardy fell more and more frequently into broods, and into eddies of ideas, turning and turning around, a tightening coil of concentration sucking his sense of safety and accomplishment down out of sight so he could no longer see with any degree of satisfaction his face in the mirror or shiny desk at his office or his name on a ticket purchased for him for a plane or on a paycheck received in the mail since someone at work had started unsealing envelopes to peek — one presumed — at what others were making. It was in just such a brown study, one noon, as he was driving to an appointment at Walter Reade — why was it always the lunch hour? he had munched through so many dismal minutes of meditation lately, whenever he was away from his work, and that was the reason — being off duty — he imagined, because then his mind was free to maunder…anyway, he was in a high-noon mood when he drew up to an intersection occupied by hefty yellow-slickered firemen helping yet another year the children stricken with impetigo to control their itch, when, without a thought, nary a realization, he tossed his half-eaten handful of hamburger pickle lettuce cheese yellow mustard meat and bun into a proffered boot as the light fortunately turned and his foot scooted his car through the intersection with such admirable though unplanned dispatch he hardly heard the holler behind him. Hardy couldn’t have helped himself. His hand had had a will, for the moment, of its own, as unconscious as the sharpshooter of foul shots is supposed to be, eye arm aim and lifted limb, like that of a dancer, oblivious to the howls of the crowd, the taunts of the enemy, as automatically accurate as the strike of the snake or the escape of the grouse, more the latter, as Hardy zoomed with an incontinent squeal across the crossed roads and into an unexpected lack of traffic. Which he believed was a lucky thing, beginning to sigh with relief before he knew what he should feel relieved about, when he realized instead that it made the task of the car now following him an easy one. Here it came, with apparatus of a dismaying sort — like a siren or twin flashers — on its roof. One of the fire folk was after him — what could they do? — Hardy’s hands began to sweat on the wheel, but now he didn’t dare speed with a coplike character on his tail, closing fast, and — wait a minute — going around in a rush, with a luggage rack on the roof, not a siren or some lights, a condition Hardy would have recognized had he been less shaken — what could they have done, had it actually been an authority who then stopped him? — there was no law to his knowledge determining what you might or might not drop in a boot unless it was a bomb if the boot was held up to your nose, and without any invitation, if you were stopped legally at a light, minding your own thoroughfare; still, Hardy had behaved badly because he had let an impulse, without warning — the way with impulses — overcome him. Then he thought: foreign money. He flew to Toronto, Paris, Rome, Madrid, London, even Singapore and Hong Kong. And returned with unspent coins of their realms in his pockets. Heavy as his thoughts. What was he thinking? Why was he sweating? His hands, his palms, his thoughts, sweating heartsweat. Hardy saw palms crossed with coin. Have sum. Will travel. He of course saved his change: he piled it into margarine tubs for use another time the way he’d washed out the containers, melting the oil with very hot water, carefully, like those paper-coated lard cans must not have been, the coins in stacks arranged by size and therefore by denomination; so when he alit at Tegel and needed a nosh or a newspaper before he hit the Exchange he already had in hand a few marks. How they would rattle down the tubes of the Salvation Army’s Santa — Hardy’s savings — and drop to the money-littered bottom of Kringle’s bucket — MERRY CHRISTMAS — or fill with their wish-fulfilling weight the palm of some arrogant accoster — GOD BLESS YOU SAHR — or sag the hat of the street entertainer, fiddling and singing sixties songs in a voice that was strangled by his nose. “At this time, I am recovering from two serious injuries — a near fatal head injury from an auto accident and a severe leg injury suffered while rock climbing.” The margins of these missives were justified. That is: they were written on a computer. Issued in begging batches by a dot matrix printer. Poor unfortunate bastards. Hurt. Out of work. Overcome by obligations. Molly giggled quite a lot. Hardy kneaded her buttocks, then her back. You do like tending to me, don’t you, she said. Don’t you like to be tended? Hardy thumbed her shoulder blades. ’Course. But I enjoy it because it’s so important to you, she said, turning and inserting him. Hours in airports. It was another reason why he was valued by his firm: he could travel without becoming rebelliously bored or worn out; jet lag didn’t leave him irritable or sleepy; he was indifferent to the strangeness of strange rooms, even to strange tongues, money, towns, faces, food. He read The Wall Street Journal for practice, and, on long flights, Business Week, Fortune, or Forbes because they projected, like a few frames of film, a good impression. Hardy’s garb was the sort you’d never notice. I like your clothes better off, Molly said; they’re nice folded over the back of a chair…where his jacket kept its drape. He opened envelopes carefully so they wouldn’t tear, especially after he began finding those begging letters in his box. One day he received: two. With a solicitation from the Kennedy Center Opera Company in addition. He could become a donor for fifty, a sponsor for a hundred, a benefactor for two Cs, a sustainer for five, an angel if more. Angels could go to rehearsals, hobnob with the singers, sip a glass in the greenroom with the first violinist. Angels flew through generous clouds of gratitude. They — the Kennedy Center Opera Company — would love to be named in the will of Hugh Hamilton Hardy, Esq., Attorney at Law. What could he will them, he wondered. He’d will them society women in gorgeous gowns to grace their glamorous intermissions. No, stay on top, I like it better. But how had they got the address of his apartment? His office would seem a more likely target, if anything about these requests was likely. And Hardy felt, as he gradually began to process and assimilate the many messages — he undertook to number them in an upper corner — that they were suddenly swarming and assailing him, creating a weight in his stomach with their carbon- or computer-copied sentences. On the back of one envelope, in pencil, were painfully printed words his lawyer eye read as Latin but, except for the “Deo,” didn’t understand: “vero glutine ei conglutinature, id est caritate…adhaerens Deo.” What in the world? He knew “id est” and probably “vero” too. There was a dogthrown bone bothering his belly though he hadn’t swallowed it, just chased it: the memory of a horrid moment heretofore only his childhood knew. To pass through untouched had been his intention. As through airports, on planes, in enemy offices. “Glutinus”? In front of his own wide window where he could watch George Washington students, as well as secretaries, stream from the streets: he was…ensconced…envelope in hand, Latin on its back flap like a mystery motto. His father had once said he’d been “touched” for a loan, and Hardy had wondered for a while about what that was: was it special, such a touch? was it a secret society’s secret signal? a gesture of intimacy? the call for an historic promise to be fulfilled? It was. In order to seem a bit more personal to those designated by a list to receive them, his mother wrapped certain gifts in white tissue paper because it was Christmas, but in white tissue paper, too, because such paper was plain and unprepossessing, and wouldn’t too entirely intimidate its recipient, or advertise its offering as more valuable than it was. It was thought to give to the box a festive and personal touch, and possible because Hardy’s parents knew the name, the address, the sex and size of the family. A tag might say: “for the boy.” Women wrapped. Men undid. Wrapping was only for toys and trinkets, not for common staples, or for cleaning powders. There were a few of his father’s discarded shirts in the cache, a sweater that never fit anyone, as well as a hat with a perky flower, a skirt of a length to encourage modesty, a box of pencils which were not all stubs, and other useful things in serendipitous variety — bridge club favors, for instance, that Hardy’s mother had happily received but hadn’t liked. Then a bag of candy — jelly beans or corn. Nothing — like the plain white wrapping paper — fancy. How abundant, how refulgently full of good things, the big box finally looked. Hardy was made to admire it, and his reluctance to do so was assumed to be the result of being asked to give up some unemployed toy or two of his own to the accumulating bounty. “From the Hardy Family and Mr. Hardy’s Homeroom” was printed in block letters on a large red-and-white shipping tag wired to one of the carton’s corners. Jackson Central Senior High, the school’s name, was writ small at the bottom of the label, but was never an afterthought. The box, now precariously laden, was placed very carefully in the trunk of the Packard (a vintage car especially polished for the journey and felt to be festive) and then they all prepared to go out and do good — as sober in their selection of suit and dress as the choice of tissue was. By now most children had left school to wait for a Christmas that was only a week and a half away. Carols were relentlessly replayed by the radio and saccharine movies by the tube. The day was cool bright dry and brittle. The road seemed slow to turn, reluctant to roll. Hardy had a heavy stomach. Full of what they called knots, he decided. His father said it was like having a bone in your belly. Molly moaned to keep him interested. In the middle of moving up and down on her like a pump handle trying to coax a little water, Hardy suddenly heard in his head — so long, so long ago — the title on the tag. From the Hardy Family and Mr. Hardy’s Homeroom, he thought, as he thrust home. Afterward he rose as if setting, so weary he was. That was a change, Molly said with a light laugh of satisfaction. But for Hardy, something…everything…gave him, when weighed, a wrong sum; was amiss and out of place like a shoe in a sink; a sinister slope slid under and fought off his step. His father, of course, drove. As carefully as a driver’s ed instructor. Seedy neighborhoods succeeded one another. His mother said: looks like rather a nice house. And then the car slowed before a front porch that sagged a little along the bungalow’s short length. One door and two wide windows faced the street, the windows set off well to one side as if they were afterthoughts. Hardy looked hard for mice but didn’t notice any. Paint clung to the clapboards the way insects cling — with expert indifference. There were no curtains in the windows, only tattered shades that had been indecisively drawn down. His father grunted and pulled the Packard onto two narrow strips of concrete that served as a drive. Did he feel like this when going to the dentist? Intestines might not grumble, they were supposed to be ropy, but how friendly was his stomach to the lake of lava it presently entertained? Are you sure these people need relief, his mother asked. They were on the list, his father replied. Homerooms just pick — you know — just pick a name. Well, you should have gauged the address. It must be a two-bedroomer, they’re not cramped, moving into her hypercritical mode, and adopting a tone that made her son cringe: cool, cruel, inexorable. It was the same voice that discussed his report card. It was the same voice that listed his shortcomings as if being a son were a performance to be reviewed. It was the same voice that wondered who had left a shoe in the study — with a sock stuffed in it — where the sixth braid ovaled itself into the rag rug. It was the same voice. Hardy’s father kept out of his schooling. Conflict of interest, his father said, a viewpoint that was baffling for a boy, but was quite comprehensible to a young man in the lawyer line. Bell or buzzer couldn’t be heard, probably didn’t work. His father thundered the door; his mother rapped sharply as though with heels. Hardy heard the din long after it was physically complete. At last the door cracked and a face could be seen through a former screen. Missus…Hardy, heavy in the plastic-coated armchair the apartment furnished him, couldn’t remember, couldn’t dredge up the name, ordinary as every day, a name he thought he’d never forget; well, he hadn’t forgotten, just misplaced it, yet it was not on the tip of anything either. Missus…A pale face appeared, not at eye height, not even at his height, a little girl’s face, though his father addressed her as Missus more than once while the kid stared at the alien invaders. Oz-borne. Hardy sighed, some would have said in relief, but Hardy didn’t feel relieved, he remembered very vividly that Molly had said — he was about to roll off and slide under — had said stay — when they were in the midst — had said stay where you are, I like it better. Hardy’s thumb remained forgotten in the open envelope that now lay in his lap. Memory was a spiteful monster. Going on then in the conventional way and reaching the middle of their journey — in some books supposed to be the best part — he read his father’s homeroom off the wall behind the headboard even though the headboard was busy waggling. Saw it there as if that’s where his mind’s eye was. Not the number of Hardy’s homeroom, to whose bags he’d brought his dented demeaning bean soup (maybe chili) can, but his father’s, though the collection was their joint benevolence now, the largesse of the family, bounty that was presently trunked in the freshly polished Packard. Saw with his mind’s eye, then heard it said in his head despite the action of his hips, which were pumping as though he were running no maybe climbing stairs. The words were as vivid as dreamed. Normally…normally?…normally after his devotional rites — toe two toe ten — she had settled on him, slowly as nightfall, teasing him in. Later, one leg through a panty, she said it was a nice change. No. That was a change, is what she said, sitting on “that” as though it were a sofa. Nice remained unproffered. She wore a satisfied smile to signal her approval. Did she perhaps mean doing it in bed? waggling the headboard? The kid went away at least her face did. Leaving to be seen through the screen a faint wall maybe not dirty. Hardy’s father said don’t, she’s fetching her folks, but his mother drummed on. It was the same as a stampede in a Saturday movie. Then the empty screen drew back and they mostly went in. Hardy’s father mumbled a minute if you please and went back to the car while Hardy and his mother hovered at the sill a moment before stumbling stupidly — well, Hardy did, he stumbled stupidly — into a dim room where there was a presence. Oh I guess we need some light, Frank, an air-filled voice said. Frank? Violet, get your father, thems from the charity is here. In a minute a man came to snap a shade up in one of the windows. There was a pause like that between distant lightning and its thunder. Hardy’s father, bearing the box, pushed through the door. The room had no table, only a few chairs, so finally, after a hesitating turn around, Hardy’s father bent to lower the carton with an almost inaudible grunt to the floor. The room, in its emptiness, neared neat. Frank was fat. One count for and one against then — on his mother’s tally. The women…especially the girl…their daughter no doubt…was thin as hope, and her mother was slight too, wispy-haired, an Ozark mountain blonde with an Okie overbite, cheeks that had sunk under a now cool crust, and wearing a much-washed — would that be his mother’s judgment? — pale, unfrilly — unfrilly was a positive point — what would you call it? — frock? Point plus. Point minus. Point plus. Point plus. Point plus. Good early lead. They stood around the box like mourners at a grave. There was no Christmas tree. There were no stickers on the windows pretending to be bows or bells. He saw no paper chains, no wreaths, no signs of lush living, which was lucky. There was one lamp whose shade was slightly askew, something on one wall Hardy never made out, four wooden chairs whose seats had once been caned — Hardy’s father, during the inevitable postmortem, would surmise — where now scrap-shaped pieces of plywood were nailed. Violet of the thin arms held her mother’s hand, and Frank, stout, solemn or sullen, who could tell? — Hardy’s mother would be the judge of that — stood in the middle of the room as still as if he were holding up the roof. Hardy’s father had a speech whose delivery would not be denied, not even by silence. And Hardy heard him as he had other years, during other dispensations, without admitting any meaning, suffered the schoolteacher’s voice which came spooling out of his father’s mouth, a voice specially created for educational occasions and enveloped by its tone the way the words which fill a cartoon balloon are encircled: lettered more darkly for emphasis here, light of line for contrast there, larger or smaller sometimes as its message required, and accompanied by exclamations stark as pines in an otherwise snowed-over field. But Hardy couldn’t have repeated a single syllable. Memory was a sly monster maybe, and forgetting a fearful necessity; yet the fear was there, brought on by the experience of blanks, bothersome blanks concerning this or that, this or that that should have been available to be summoned like a servant. His father gave credit where credit was due, so much Hardy was sure of. Teachers knew what credits were and how they counted. The homeroom’s number would be — would have been — reiterated. The importance of giving, particularly during such a season, would be stressed, though because of the separation of church and state, religious language, infrequent in his family anyway, would be excluded. These three: faith, hope, and charity — no, no, love; charity had been excluded — replaced or excluded. Hardy stared through the dusk at a few dark hurrying figures, late from work, on their way home. Lights came on in previously unlit buildings. Shifts were changing. Day students replaced by older hopefuls. Private life would now, for a night, be tried. And found wanting. Meanwhile he sat in dreamthought while his father concluded his pieties with words almost whispered they’d become so solemn, touching the box with the toe of his shoe to put period to all he’d said. Hardy’s father seemed nervous, which was a surprise, because only after the speech was delivered did he remember to ask if he was addressing Mr. and Mrs. Osborne. Or…? Neither said a word though Mrs. Osborne emitted a faint mewmaah. The rule was: the box had to be entirely emptied so that the carton could be retrieved. Hardy’s mother said why don’t you see what’s there, or did she just say see what’s here? Why don’t you. Mr. Osborne peered down like a stone head does waiting for the water to drain from its mouth. There’d be can one, can two, package three, toy four, till all were removed and placed upon the floor…an eternity. Hardy’s discomfort was not quite the same as that evident in Mr. Osborne. Hardy was wearing humiliation’s second-best suit: his was the shame of one who shames. Mr. Osborne’s heavy arms fell from his dun-colored shirt like further sleeves. In his regular line of work Hardy had encountered many liars, many spokesmen for the culpable, many criminals, and some showed, some even felt, guilt, occasionally they even inflicted their remorse upon him; but never had he seen shame, not in those well-oiled offices, not from hirelings who had patted the requisite powders on their blade-shaven cheeks each morning (just as Hardy did: foam first, palped into place, the razor moving as if it were mowing snow, then a blubbery rinse of the scraped face and a rough towel-off before the slap of skin-tightening bracer and the comfort of soothing talc); flunkies like himself who nevertheless had redlipped, red-fingertipped secretaries to stoke the coffeepot and greet them in the morning with a steaming mug bearing a company insignia; because, having known both sorts of shame — having inflicted shame and suffered it — shame searing his soul so its skin smoked — Hardy knew the difference between a guilty conscience and crushed pride, between — in a shameless world — getting caught and being defiled. I like it because you like it, Molly’d said. She’d said so much this visit, which was not like her. Now and then she’d squeal, sure, often emit a sigh, or maybe give a grunt of desire or a moan of pleasure, but not…she’d not…make remarks. Look, Charlie, a can of beans, the lady whispered. Peas, Hardy’s mother quickly corrected. They have black eyes in the picture. Like the Susans, Hardy heard himself, in painful sympathy, say. The little girl’s voice had sounded full of false excitement, but she probably was excited a little. There were packages tissue had turned into treasures, after all. The girl had let go of her mother’s hand when her mother had stooped to unpack the provisions, so she was free now to look at Hardy. My name is Susan, she said, but my eyes are green. Cans and jars and bottles were surrounding the carton like defenders come out of their castle. Susan’s mother made low moos of presumably…affirmation. The resolution required for freezing Mr. Osborne’s face left the rest of him as loose and dangerous as a slide of shale. While Hardy was looking at the girl who had decided to call herself Susan, Hardy felt her father — Hardy felt the heat from her father’s head — and Hardy sensed their mutual embarrassments burning like beacons built to warn of reefs. Why don’t you open this, honey, Susan’s kneeling mother suggested. Pulling at one end, the girl immediately knotted the string. Let me do that, Hardy’s mother said, scooping it up to untie the tangle with her teeth. Ripping open an end, his mother handed the package back. Thrust the package…pushed the package…he pushed his memory of the package back. Immediately that day that visit that intrusion what he’d seen through the screen — nothing…nothing — seemed to Hardy far away like the people passing that last moment in the street, and his fingers began to play with the envelope in his lap as if his mood had made his fingers nervous. It was a distance through which outcry couldn’t reach. If a woman walking in the street below were suddenly accosted by a buck in running shoes and asked for change — wud do a deal of gud, ma’am — and a hand were thrust in her face so aggressively she started, perhaps cried out, seeing big eyes bearing down, suppose she screamed, the scream would seem no more to Hardy than a leaf let loose to litter the park. So pink the palm. Soft Mollypink the palm. Maybe it was his mother who shoved the whole scene like the package into his fidgeting fingers. It’s some pencils. How nice. Almost all of them the same size. Mr. Osborne growled; it wasn’t a word he uttered, just a sound, a growl a growl; but Hardy hardly heard the whole gruff rumble of it, his blood was hammering his head so, though a figure — it must have been his father — stepped back from the group as though startled, pushed. The fallback of his forces went unadvertised. Susan’s mother continued to gallop gamely toward the cliff’s edge. She shook a blouse from its wad for all to see. It had pretty pink buds all over it like the pustules of some disease. It was encouraged to billow out over the top of the box, to settle like a blanket of snow in a theater scene. Leave, roared Mr. Osborne. Take — stuff — this stuff — leave. Please, someone said softly. Suddenly that resolute face had become a face worn featureless by centuries of rain. Hardy’s mother’s hands flew into the air and Hardy’s father, in a cloud of consternation such as a rejected genie might employ, caromed through the door still narrowly ajar. Hardy was suddenly in the rear seat of their rapidly retreating car without the slightest idea of how he’d gotten there. For hours he bore burning ears. No one ever spoke of it: not of the hoarseness of the outcry, not of the rude completeness of their dismissal, not of the Alpine height of the ingratitude displayed, not of the Hardy family’s ignominious flight. Why should anyone speak of something that had never happened? couldn’t have, consequently didn’t. Hardy was haunted by afterimages, however. Of a small worn rug their gift box nearly smothered when the Hardy offering was set down upon it. A thin band on the thin finger of a thin hand. String struggling in the mouth of his mother. Who was, as a result of their commonly imposed Coventry concerning the subject, unable to compute the recipient’s failing score, since the game had been called on account of catastrophe; because that’s what she and his father usually did, went over the occasion like a lawyer and a client practicing Q & A: how did the house look? for it must be poor and run-down to provide proof of need, yet it should seem tidy and scrubbed to demonstrate character; were their manners appropriate to the occasion? neither suspiciously servile and gushingly grateful nor indifferent nor rudely unappreciative; how were their hearts? their spirit must be sufficiently downcast as to require rescue, but not wholly crushed and beyond restoration; did it appear that they would put their provisions to a proper use, that the clothes would be cared for and worn with a smile, that delighted children — Lily or Lilac — would play with their new-to-them toys? Above all, the Hardys wanted to come away feeling that their effort, and that of the homeroom children, had been worthwhile, that some injustice in this world had been set right, some suffering alleviated; it was the least the benefited could do, because it encouraged more giving, more help in the future to folks like themselves, down on their luck and needing a hand; for suppose there was no hand, suppose, as in this case, it had been badly bitten, and was held out no longer; suppose Mr. Hardy’s kids collected cans without élan, that tins were stuffed into his father’s homeroom sacks as they were heaped higgledy-piggledy in all the others — then what? for heaven’s sake. The box had been left behind like an abandoned cannon when the Hardy family fled the field. There would be no box by which to measure next year’s offerings. To make a match: that might mean no offerings at all. At last Hardy pulled the plain sheet forth, properly folded in threes like all the others. Postmortem, he thought. Appropriate designation. There’d been no postmortem. Yet he had just now remembered one. In which his father had held forth on the subject of — what? the repaired seats of the Osborne chairs. Yes. So had it happened? had there been a rehash after all, a family confab like so many others? or had he imagined it as he had imagined the words on Molly’s bedroom wall? while headlonging into his pleasure. Molly may have been indulging him their entire time together, while he was equally intent on indulging her. Hey…maybe that was the definition of a decent relationship. Were he to speak for her now, he might just say: I am giving you what I imagine you want, while you are pretending to want it on my account. Well, little wrong with that, Hardy decided. It had not been a day of decision, but it had been a decisive day. T-day. The nightlights were lit. Yellow patches pretended to warm the streets. The company was sending him back to Toronto. Apparently his pleasantly delivered threats were no longer threatening. Toronto had done nothing to remedy their errors, although they had admitted them readily enough. They had even offered reparations, and Hardy had been gracious in his acceptance. So what had happened? Whatever it was, recalcitrance had occurred twice during the last three weeks — after each of his recent trips, in fact — nothing had happened, that was his problem — though Toronto was especially troubling because the sale of inaccurate blood-testing equipment was hardly a minor matter, not like those damn Mexmade hospital scuffs that peeled apart from toe to heel, or the porous plastic sheeting they made in Moline…man alive…manufacturing methods were poor everywhere in the world, but Hardy had held up his end — yes — up to now he had been almost a hundred percent successful in the intimidation department; his firm was spoiled, it had too high an expectation, Pilip had even thought it necessary to point out, at yesterday’s rather tense meeting — tense for the first time — that Health and Haven didn’t like buying the same plane ticket twice. Get your game face on, Pilip had urged, and go get ’em. Maybe Hardy had somehow broken the chain of inconvenience. He suspected the chain wouldn’t enjoy losing linkage. Then the letter unfolded like something alive in his lap. Another petition for his collection. Hardy had to file his own stuff, keep his own records, maybe that’s where the foul-up was, not in some weakness of his game face, not in his presentation of the grievance, but in a flaw in the paperwork which lay deeply out of sight like an intestinal worm. He didn’t believe his own argument, however. Hardy’s conscience didn’t hear in his words the requisite conviction. He never believed anything said in self-defense. What was wanted from him this time? “Hello,” Hardy read. Was that the way to begin to beggar? With hello? What happened to “Dear Sir or Madam”? As if his Hugh name on the envelope were of doubtful sex. “I write this letter in need of immediate assistance for a travel opportunity…” He — who? — Baltho — Baltho? Well, Harold Baltho didn’t know the half of it, did he? He hadn’t a job, no doubt, though Hardy hadn’t read on and so he didn’t know how Baltho had lost his last one, and therefore Baltho was not in a position to feel Hardy’s own apprehensions, many of which Hardy had read from another letter, this one printed on Greg Pilip’s tightly smiling face, sent by Greg Pilip’s carefully entwined fingers, read off their display on Pilip’s swept desk, a heavy gold frat ring on one hand, wed band on the other, thin file folder to his left, expensive rollerball resting to his right, well, Hardy had a frat ring — Delta Tau Delta — he could wear it if he wanted to, but didn’t because it might encourage some fellow feeling, a sense of internal alliance, just by chance, of course, in one of the deadbeats, you never knew, they went to college too, everybody went to college, college was as common as canned corn, even advanced degrees were without distinction. “…which has recently been offered to me.” You are my sacred shelta, they might sing silently while feeling some stickum if not a bond with Hardy, a bond outside of business. “The trip is through Trinity College in Connecticut and involves travel and study in Tibet, Kathmandu, Nepal and Italy.” Hardy could feel his travel bag where he liked it, crouched as an obedient dog might crouch, between his legs. In fact, the chair he had pulled to the window was very like those you find in an airport lounge, simply not welded to one another in regimented rows…well, the rumps wouldn’t really be resting; instead, impatient and anxious and weary, anticipating hours of discomfort on the plane, where their owners would be squeezed behind a presoiled tray like an infant about to be force-fed a tin of stewed tomatoes or French-cut green beans, and fastened safely in a thirty-thousand-foot high chair by a stomacher — French-cut green beans would be too classy — and the rumps’ owners would sit and snooze, or lie their way up the corporate ladder, unaware they were bullshitting Dick Tracy, that moment on his way to interrogate criminals caught trying to stiff Health and Haven with scuffs made of paper, maybe, or of passing off their sheeting as impervious to incontinence and protective of cotton, didn’t they realize that mattresses were soakers? that mattresses cost money? especially ones short on springs? ones constructed of unresilient coils? moreover that when mattresses have been regularly wet they can’t be reused as if you could simply rinse them out and wring them in knots like a gym towel, or replump them for another old bladder-blown shankbone to pee in his sleep on, the old goat getting out of his room and up to the nurses’ station to complain about his applesauce while wearing cardboard scuffs and a paper gown designed on account of its inadequate ties to fall open so the sight of the patient’s shrunken penis would not be denied the staff, and so that way they’d know where the wet patch had come from when they came to turn Old Bony from one bedsore to another…Oh, yeah, he’d have to say something of the sort…You could bet Hardy didn’t find that spiel weak or unconvincing as he heard himself make it, because he’d have to throw a more threatening pitch than he normally did, once up north in Toronto yet again, though in words more genteel than those in his head: about HIV and the scandal power of the press, image damage and the costs of lab contamination including lawsuits the size of skyscrapers, of which Toronto finally had a few, but where you could find really good Chinese, not like in costly but cheapeat D.C., where there were more food poisoners, Hardy had after long experience decided, than elsewhere in this ethnickerized country. In D.C. secretaries and their suitors actually sought out places where they would have to eat with their fingers and be given limberbread to wipe them on if they didn’t seize the opportunity to lick their dates’ digits: thumb waa one, pinky wee two. There were restaurants representing countries whose natives had never had anything to eat, newly unified nations where living and starving were one. Had he not recently received a “Dear Colleague” implorement? — here it was — from Unit 19a, Goldring Barn Est (“Dear Colleague”?…“est” was estate?), Henfield Road, Small Dole (were they kidding?), West Sussex, that was headlined: HELPING OUR CHILDREN IN AFRICA AFFECTED BY AIDS and that requested money to support a fund-raising cycle ride across Tunis to Cape Town (had to be…had to be…a deeply dumb joke). Hardy read that Baltho had only been informed of his good fortune a week ago and had only a month in which to find the funding for this “fantastic adventure…” um…“unparalleled opportunity…” “We will be traveling with an army escort through the Asian leg of the trip” thanks to…thanks to “the Nepalese Ministry of Culture.” Took the cake, Hardy judged, first prize at the fair. “…deepest regions of Tibet and India without fear of danger…” Health and Haven had no deadbeats in either region so it was not likely Hardy would have an opportunity to suffer exotic dysenteries anytime soon, if he held on to his job, a worry that, before yesterday, would never have bedeviled him, but did devil him now, even though he knew he was being — what did they say? — too litmussy — no, too prone to hives. For instance, these letters were getting to him, he had to admit, even though he was receiving many cordialities with which to end his day as if his day had come in the mail. “May God bless you and my grateful appreciation in advance.” Nevertheless, Hardy was of the impression that large portions of the population were ill with the dismals. “All I have done for these past three years is try hard to get back to Happiness!” Rhonda has debt, depression, and cancer, a husband who is out of work and an eviction notice from her landlord. Howie Towel is a motivated minorities person, too, “with a lot of invention design idea’s, that need to be researched, developed and marketed for the consumer market. Some of the ideas have to do with exercise equipment, and safety-breathing apparatus like for swimming, fire, as well as for gas mask, e.t.a.” “While other young brides get a nice ‘Honey-Moon,’ I’ve faced nothing but hardship and pain.” From the height of his own thirty years, Hardy wanted to assure Rhonda — Rhoda? — that he understood…that most young brides got just what she was getting, and suggest to Howie Towel that the heads of losers were stuffed to the sinuses with projects and plans which would never see more light than the handkerchief. Hardy would be that tough about it — the truth was a species of tough love to be sure — and he’d bring that news to his targets in Toronto too. Before now, however, he had never had to buck himself up for his job, he had just done it: walked in and wiped them out. Back to thoughtless happiness. Yes. Had he been there, and had he enjoyed it? happiness? You always seem so happy, Molly had observed; was it because Molly’s bare feet were giving him the Turk’s massage that he seemed so? happy? Mr. Undemonstrative? A real Turk, fat as a harem eunuch, would have crushed his back like a biscuit. Hey, ethnic sex books — a new direction. The Bulgarian Blow Job. Recipes included. He could suggest such a project to Howie Towel instead of sending him money. However, none of this deeply dumb japery elevated his spirits. If Baltho had made the most outrageous request, there was Gerald Hepsmith to win the blue ribbon for directness: “I been working in a screw company for twenty years. I am now planning on buying a screw company. I am a little short so I had to put it on hold. Because of my financial situation. Whatever you can give me will be appreciated.” But no God bless. Just an illegible signature. No date either. And the “r” of “Dear Si” had disappeared. Hardy thought he might mail an “r” to Carol Stream, Illinois. A very faint dot on the map, he bet. Hardy had so far — depressing phrase — had so far received requests from McAlester, Oklahoma; and Moorhead, Minnesota; from Los Osos, California; Los Angeles and Garden Valley, ditto; from Leavenworth, Kansas; and St. Louis too, as well as Naples — Naples? — Naples, Florida. The Brits had weighed in in the normal way (only one was using the AIDS scam), but with letters too long to finish and with signatures aristocratically scrawled. A letter from London and another from Glasgow were identical except that Mr. Akingbemisilu wanted a thousand more than the Scot’s three. One petition, the most outrageously distant, was from a couple of retirees in Australia who desired to relocate abroad in order, of course, to help people avoid the calamities that had befallen them. They were experts in the mismanagement of money. A woman living, she said, in the backwoods of the Sierra Mountains with her infirm husband and disabled son, wanted a ten-thousand-dollar down payment on an apartment building located more conveniently near their family doctor. For this she blessed him richly. Then nearer his home (if his apartment could be so called), Hardy had heard from Waldorf, Maryland; just a bit south, he thought, on Route 301, as well as receiving the bad news from D.C. itself, where Howie resided. Wash D.C. all you want, if you want, the locals said, but washing won’t remove the grime left on the city’s marble columns from smoke blown by decades of elected officials. When D.C. didn’t stand for Dismal Climate or Decay City, it stood for Desperate Cunts or Dumb Congressmen with Doubtful Convictions, depending upon whom you were laughingly achat with and into whose bailiwick the party was being pitched. Hey, Mama, how are the twins? Cities you’ll never visit, Daddy. Hardy hadn’t heard from Chicago, Detroit, Philadelphia, or Cleveland; they were no-shows at his soup kitsch; they added no hungry mouths to the breadlines. There was always tomorrow’s delivery, of course, when another nation or another major urban center might be heard from. Pack lightly tonight for a quick trip, though Toronto was a long ride. No aerosol foam, no throwaway razor, no astringent, no talc because he’d count on an immediate turnaround and be back before his whiskers grew. Good tag, sharp description: back before my/your whiskers grow. Underwear in an emergency. He remembered being stranded in Sacramento. With a hole in a sock. Remember to reset alarm. Skip breakfast. Breakfast was always a bore. Anything in a bowl was a bore. Hardy’s meals were mostly a bore because he had to eat them alone. Read and eat — not so easy. Taxi to the plane — a luxury because he could easily take the Metro. Hope the weather didn’t decide to wet the runways causing underbooked flights to be canceled on account of wet wheels or other imaginary reasons, mostly mechanical so as to suggest a concern for passenger safety. One of the damn doors won’t close. The nose wheel is flat. When, if the air ever brought him there — to the Tonto Medical Instruments Company of Toronto — he’d go straight for the jugular. Bloody their files, floor, and furniture. Buy a screw factory for Gerald. Return early evening. Ring up, should he? Molly. Wait a minute…wait. Hardy had what might be described as a secular epiphany. A letter he had received some weeks earlier, and which curiosity had encouraged him to retain, had been, he suddenly saw, the opening salvo in this barrage laid down on him by the needy. It had been from some godforlorn place in…Illinois…like Carol Stream. The room was dark now that night had sooted in, so when he rose he groped around the bowl of his borrowed lamp for its switch. In hotels he never could find them, but here, in his own…by now…he ought. Suddenly he saw his shadow so he must be real. The soft caramel-colored carpet made him kick off his shoes but the feeling was still sock. It was from a company or an institution and had an acronym, CETN, taken from the guy’s name, the guy who was running the scam — here it was — Pecetnic. Avery Pecetnic. The letter was got up and laid out like a prospectus, with topic sentences in bold: “I’m offering you a personal open invitation to contribute to a unique solution to the problems that plague our youth today.” Am I one of them youths? Maybe he’d be one of them plagues. Instead, maybe he — Hugh Hardy — came with the apartment. For rent: studio apartment, sofa bed and lawyer included, cost to you: no more a month than a maid. He had wasted his education and become a bully. He. Not even a big one. A Hugh. He struck terror only because of the mob-sponsored halo he wore. The black case he carried clearly contained at least one pistol proud of its caliber. His cool came from the confidence he had in his backup who was just a suitcoat behind him. He had a blackmailer’s face, blank as a wall. He spoke his piece like a priest. They cowered and caved in on account of his neat nails, his starched cuffs, his tightly knotted tie, the slight crimp in his hair where you might have thought a hat had sat. But he had failed to threaten anyone at Tonto, Toronto. This was not a welcome outcome. Moreover, his love affair with Molly played well only for one act. He had no home, no pet, no lounge chair worn by his own butt into comfortable billows. Worse. He had no desire for any. He should feel bad about that. He didn’t. His job was no more his than the hat he didn’t have. Why should he worry about it? His shirts sat in a blond box made of layered drawers, the facing sides scooped so they could look open like mouths: white shirts, all the same, ties with the standard slanted stripe, some red, some blue, and, as Molly said, his jacket looked best on the back of a chair. Toe ten. About clothes he didn’t care, though he knew how to tie a Windsor knot. When he’d gotten his first job, his father had given him three pairs of links. Hardy felt far away, high in the sky. Flying without wings, he was barely visible, no more than the moon in daytime. Though he often complained, he ate whatever came to hand. No one could say he had preferences that put pressure on him or skewed his course. He didn’t smoke, was the most casual of drinkers, only mildly interested in coffee, avoided vegans, serious sexual kinks, was rarely late for appointments. Hardy had no handles. Love or otherwise. He found he had a plan, though he would never have called it his “plan”—not until this nightfall when he saw the shadows of the furnishings on the floor. He wouldn’t have known they were there until the light came on. His sweet round face might linger in his target’s gaze like the blur of something bright; remain after he’d softly closed the office door behind him; but no one remembered what it was that gave their eyes, for a moment, an annoying afterimage. Hardy was merely an emissary from Tonto’s own incompetence. That’s what he should say: I’m Hugh Hamilton Hardy, and I represent your sloppy quality control. I’m the Ghost of Fudges Past. I am your Omissions. Hardy avoided giving offense, so why was he a strong arm in the delinquent-performance business? When he was utterly out of every social spotlight; when he was like the shadows that disappear during switchoff; when he was the way the world wasn’t during naptime: why were these letters being mailed to him? “Provided you had the resources at your disposal, would you be willing to contribute ten thousand, five thousand, or thereabouts dollars? Which category do you fit into? All that is required is faith and a minimum of twenty-five hundred dollars. We need heroes such as yourself to come on board to make this an effective vehicle for positive change.” They had Hardy all wrong. Or had Hardy’s address all wrong. His profession too. How little did these envelopes know him, even the ones with official-looking windows. They should be set right. Gee, he’d been all ready to give two thousand dollars, he might reply, but that sum was well beneath Pecetnic’s required minimum. Hardy had no gestures, generous or otherwise. That was it. Molly, undulating her arms, shuddering her tits, swiveling her torso, shaking her ass, had told him straight out. Not only did he never waste motions, he never gave away his feelings by unguarded body language, through this or that subordinate gesture, so that nothing was conveyed — nothing — not geniality, not anger (not happiness?), while at the same time, he wasn’t mechanical either, which, had he been, would have written paragraphs about Hugh, the man who was absent from the man. Such discretion was not easy to manage, Molly imagined, it had to be natural to Hardy, simply to move, sit, say without swaying or sawing or jiggling or hemming or hawing or twitching or showing nerves or even being especially slow, stiff, and monotonous. Hardy picked up his briefcase. Hardy hailed a taxi. Hardy turned on a light. Actions without adverbs. Hardy rarely hiccupped, coughed, sneezed, or blew his nose, never cracked his knuckles, tugged a lobe, rubbed or fondled the slopes of his chin, yawned, ran his hands through his hair, which was stiff thick straight and blond, although he did twiddle his fingers a little, did sometimes blink overly often, did occasionally say something out loud when alone, but rarely a huff or puff otherwise, though when he came he sighed. Molly said he said saaaah. I need to ask her what color her eyes were before she went to contacts. Should I answer one of these beseechers? That might be interesting — to find out what the follow-up message would be. Or better — he could hunt up Howie Towel, who had a D.C. address, turn up on his front stoop, beribboned like a fruit basket, himself the surprise. Such an action would be uncharacteristic, Hardy was aware; indeed that was its recommendation: in terms of tactics it was the way he did business, except this time he would not be on business. He would represent — what? — a local charity, that way he could seem to be on business. How easy it was for whatshisname in Carol Stream, Illinois, to create a philanthropic outfit simply by typing CETN on his computer, and subsequently darkening his fake acronym with an elementary mouse move—CETN—so it would be ready, by virtue of another click, to be transported like royalty into the center of the page, where, with still another elementary gesture, the initials could be highlighted in order to enlarge its size and increase its power to the shout of a headline—CETN. How easy to retain the nerve, after so swiftly simple a transformation, to allege the letters stood for “Continuing Eternally to Need.” Hugh Hamilton Hardy could become a community caregiver with equal ease. Cast your bread upon the water in real life and it would sog up and sink for sure, if the ducks didn’t snap it first; but this time, Hardy thought, he might appear at opportunity’s door to demonstrate that what had been a crust when cast forth had come back by a miracle as a whole loaf, and he could hint that he’d be followed by a kingdom made of kaiser rolls — wouldn’t that be wonderful? He’d be the bread all right, a loaf so soft, to make sandwiches, he’d have to be sliced by machine. Hello there, Mr. Roller, lucky guy, your toilets are about to flush with wine. Hi Debbie — Malikowski, is it? You can leave your dying grandma and her bedside to me, I’ll sit quietly there while you go back to work to support your three preschool children and your feckless hubby, Earl, didn’t you say his name was? It did occur to Hugh, as he pondered with mounting pleasure the various agreeable responses he might make to this wholly unmerited invasion of his life, that somewhere he might have offended someone familiar with the scam, maybe some official he had had to spank, whose after-hours occupation was the fleecing of the poor, saps whose luck had oozed out, so that they were easily enticed into lying out of hope for a living: for a small sum you will be furnished with a list of premelted hearts who have a history of falling for stories full of hard luck and tough times; in addition we shall supply you with a formula to follow when petitioning them (after all, D.C. is Grant City), so your sob story will avoid mistakes of tone, errors in data, or slipups in the style of your solicitation that may scare dear Daddy Warbucks away. Attach return addresses, telephone numbers. Beg to be phoned. “Wake me up, I don’t care.” Be frank. Promise to repay. Think of it, sir, as a loan. Call on God but be conventional about it. Mention that you are the sole and sorry support of a family that of course you love. “My children that are the most precious in my life, along with my wife, see my everyday worries. I think they deserve a better life. All I need is…” My God, Debbie — who had addressed her letter with “Dear Sir or Madam”—needed only eight thousand dollars to get back on her feet. Only…“I understand you have been in a similar situation…” That last was perhaps not a wise phrase. He, Hardy, hadn’t been — wasn’t — in a similar situation. Successful people often rose like cream, steadily, though maybe oozily, yet gamely, to the top. And had never had a hitch come forward to be the hitch in their plans. Hitchless, like Hardy aimed to be. Without sin or snag, or hitch. He, Hardy, need never beg; he was not in a similar situation. Not by a mule’s smile. Hardy made a list of the differences he imagined existed between himself and his petitioners, among them the fact that even were he to be in a similar situation he’d never purchase such a stupid list, or if he did he’d never write pitiful letters to anyone about his so-called similar situation, letters where even the commas kowtowed. Entreaty would not be his forte, he’d see to that…in the life he’d one day lead. Yet the expression “similar situation” suggested a complicity he couldn’t towel off or comb away. Didn’t he go to his knees for Molly’s permissions, tongue out as a dog does, pleading for pleasure? Ah, but that was just act one in the theater of the flesh. So his and her arousals weren’t for real? “I am taking the role of an insurance broker (licensed in the state of Ohio) and am seeking other licenses, honors, degrees and equipment, besides my career in tennis that I have worked hard for. I understand you may have been in a similar situation some time in your life.” Debbie Daw, who lived on Tirmynydd Road in for god sake South Wales, wanted to get away from her mom, and wasn’t that a situation similar to Hugh’s? “…I need help to be able to look after my children properly and have a life of my own…As for my future, once my mother has passed away I hope to better myself by taking a course in floristry.” Hardy intended to sleep that night deep in the recomposition of himself so that when the light that was whitening his windows woke him, he’d be full of remedy, resolve, and inspiration. He would be the…He would represent — no — not himself — an agency, why not? community caregivers incorporated. COMMUNITY CAREGIVERS INC. COMMUNITY CAREGIVERS INC. He’d need to pack for a quick trip, though Toronto would be an overnighter now because he’d have to switch his flight into the afternoon. Pitch in a can of aerosol foam; add a simple throwaway razor, some astringent and talc, too, because he couldn’t count on being back in D.C. before his whiskers grew. Fresh underwear for an emergency. Always a good idea. This new plan had merit. It would be, after all, better to stay overnight in a restful hotel in order to come on fresh in the morning. Hit Tonto then. Like a September snowstorm. When the Canadians are not quite awake and before they’ve bought enough salt for their streets. Hit Howie Towel the same way — this up-and-coming morn, front-stoop him. Make him wish he’d never been born. Or had Howie already said that? “I’m ashamed to say I sometimes wish…” He had…had written…someone had written…Why were they writing?…writing him? he? Hugh? The question followed him to bed where, fully dressed, he fell face-first into his pillow. At dawn of the big day, Hugh took off his shoes before getting out of bed, and tossed his rumpled clothes into a corner. He saw that it had been a moist night. The streets were wet and empty. He hummed through his shower. A happy noise but not a tune. It helped to have a purpose in life. Hardy was up and out and off far too early, although he was pleased that he’d beaten the can handlers to their intersections. Hardy cruised Howie Towel’s neighborhood, one of worn red row houses sporting duplex stoops with corroded railings and crumbling steps. For his sort, these streets were still unsafe at any speed. Cruise and let them know I’m coming, he rather vaingloriously thought. Maybe I ought to honk. After all, I am a honky. But he drove out to a nearby urb and ate a dry egg on soft toast for breakfast, killing time with a Post he purchased from a sidewalk box, and toying with the counter’s sugar shaker. Now that it was nine, it might be prudent to arrive. Hugh curbed his car three row houses from his goal, and let his case swing casually in his left hand lest he be spied. Indeed, as he approached, a young black woman and two milk-chocolate-colored kids came from behind the door of three thirty-five…and a half a — number Hugh could scarcely read. She stood on the stoop while the children pellmelled up and down the sidewalk, one furzy-head darting past Hardy on his briefcase side as if he weren’t a paleface, the kid only concerned to enjoy his release, his happy flight. Hi there, good morning, Hugh greeted her, finding a morning use for some after-five joviality. She wore a simple loose cotton frock and straw sandals despite the coolish air. There was a slight gleam to her straightened hair. From the stoop she threw Hardy an intense but noncommittal look. My name is Hugh Hamilton, Hardy said, and I’m from Community Caregivers Incorporated. Don’t want any, the woman replied. The wet night’s gray skies were beginning to dissipate, and a line of soft light ran straight along the ridge of her nose to fall on the rich roll of her lower lip. I’m looking for a Mr. Howard Towel, Hamilton said, his tone agreeably deferential. Him? Hers was a stern fierce face, very sculptural, quite beautiful. Her eyes flickered, following the race of her two kids. For some reason, Hardy had got the impression that Howie Towel was white. Yes, ma’am. Mr. Towel has been in communication with our office, and—. Him? How? He don’t phone. He wrote, Hamilton said, trying to sound matter-of-fact. Nicely typed. The margins were justified. She turned to yell at a child who was now getting a little too far away. Hamilton saw clean pale heels and slender calves. He shouldn’t have said typed. He don’t type. Oh. Well. It was…typed. I type. This was a militant affirmation. It was a letter whose looks gave a good impression, Hamilton said a little lamely. When I work, that’s what I do — I type. Computer too. Git back here, Calvin — now! Clarisse! Clarisse, of course, stopped and looked back at her mother. Heedless, Calvin revved his engine, but, also careless with life the way kids are, immediately fell with a shriek on the broken and uneven cement. The young woman went calmly briskly down the steps past Hamilton toward Calvin’s fallen form. Clarisse, dolldear, she said, don’t you do that, that what your brother did. Dumb as a thumb. You boy. She shook her head slowly. Hamilton was left holding his case, now up near his chest. She pulled the boy to her and held his head against her thigh. Hamilton waited with a patience he had no need to summon. Then she led Calvin back to the steps. Calvin’s nose wasn’t runny, his eyes weren’t wet. And he was almost immediately over his howls. Well I wonder if Mr. Towel is…at home now. Had he almost said “hereabouts”? He aint. She beckoned Clarisse. This aint his home either. Oh, Hamilton said, the address on the letter…He’s gone for good, I guess, she said, looking at Hamilton as if she were really looking at him. Mr. Towel wrote us about some breathing apparatus, Hamilton persisted. He did ventions. The woman acknowledged that much. Calvin wiped his dry eyes on his mother’s dress. Soon she had Clarisse held in her other hand. He was always try’n to improve the breath’n. Mr. Towel said he needed some financial help, Hamilton told her, trying to smile at the children with both corners of his mouth. The young woman swung the kids around and turned her smooth pale heels to him. He asked me for money, Hamilton hurriedly added. He would want that, she replied, for his ventions, but it’d be no use. They was just rags and wires. She let go of Calvin to take hold of the knob on the door. Maybe she was just a sitter; the kids didn’t look hers, though they didn’t smile back when he offered them his grin, so maybe they were the offspring of Mrs. Stern the Smileless after all. Don’t go in, Hamilton said. Please. She herded Clarisse and Calvin through the door as if she hadn’t heard, her heels disappearing into an interior as dark as herself. Hardy self-consciously lowered his case and inspected the street. He saw unexpected anxiety. The door opened again. You can look if you like. Theys in the front room. The street was empty of everything except parked cars. Hamilton went quickly up the steps and slid inside. She shut the door through whose glass a gray light very faintly fell. A pale palm in a gesture which at the same time shuttered her silvered nails, and Hamilton turned left into — he guessed — a parlor where a pile of cloth bags with holes made for eyes were strewn (or so the holes seemed), and where wormlike translucent tubes were tangled. A piano bench emphasized the absence of any piano. Straightened lengths of coat-hanger wire pierced the sides of tin cans that were sitting on it. There was an ancient exerciser in the middle of much confusion. Mr. Towel described himself, Hamilton said — suddenly remembering Howie’s letter t for t — as a motivated minorities person. He weren’t, she said in evident scorn. But Hamilton wasn’t sure whether Towel weren’t a minorities person, or just weren’t motivated. Here was the exercise equipment the letter mentioned, perhaps these woolly things were the gas masks. What would have been the underwater gear, he wondered. The amber worms? Hamilton tried to take in, to understand, the…burlappy bags? Could anyone have hoped these sorry contraptions might function for them? Your husband, Hamilton began, but she interrupted. I aint married to ’um. Well when would he have written — ah — to my office? When he leff he leff his stuff was all she said, in a blacker voice than before. Maybe, Hamilton decided to hazard, maybe Mr. Towel wanted you to receive the money he wrote me to ask for. He dunt wunt me no more, or I him. Hamilton turned in the dim light toward her, caught a flash of eye, saw a flash of nail. He thrust his case awkwardly between his legs. Nothing was turning out as he had expected. He drew out his billfold and emptied it of money. I dunt wunt your munny, she said in a voice as flat and hard as the hand that subsequently slapped him when he pushed a fistful of cash in her direction. The sting went everywhere his bones went. He felt his feet as well as his cheeks warm. In a kind of blind consternation, Hardy, clutching his case to his chest like a shield, got into the hall, then stood a moment, bewildered, fist still stuffed with twenties. Calvin pulled the door open for him. There were a number of people on the street now — a baby carriage, a cat, some kids, a van. Hardy’s car was as close as Canada. He was barely aware how he clasped his money or clutched his case. In his ears Hardy heard a heart hammering. He had hot elbows, hot knees, a hot nose. With hot knees did he dare to take a plane? He made a face that no one saw how horrible. To alleviate the sting, Hardy’s blood recapitulated his every shame, and reminded him of the way he’d run after the red-haired boy with a can of — what? God, what? — held helplessly high in his hand. Then feeling mostly stupid…silly but unstruck. By his mother he’d been ass-chewed but never smacked. She bent over, brought her face close, and shouted up his nose. I understand you have helped people like me in the past. Helping those who have been trying to do right. By confronting deadbeats and cheats. Get away…get away…get away, the pounding in his head said. With care he stepped down steps that were steps well swept. Strangers who would remain strangers to him were in the street, unmoving, as if painted — their figures, their foreignness. Normal concerns were what he needed now. To restore the quo. Dare he call Molly when he came back still slap-cheeked from Toronto? Hardy promised to roll on the floor in an ecstasy provoked by her excellence. There was always more carpet. But would she ever love — or merely moisten for — a groveler? Around dawn the sidewalk had been rainwashed. It wasn’t slick but it wasn’t even. And the car — it seemed — so far. Or should he assume the supplicating posture of one dishonored…with its appropriate rush of blood in the wrong direction? Hardy had to be careful of the cracks, some of which were still dark with damp. Shift to slow, and be slow to go. Show courage. Though if he fell and dirtied his knee now she might rest his head against her thigh, and feel sorry for him, for a change, all night long.