Sweet Thursday

3 Hooptedoodle (1)

Looking back, you can usually find the moment of the birth of a new era, whereas, when it happened, it was one day hooked on to the tail of another.

There were prodigies and portents that winter and spring, but you never notice such things until afterward. On Mount Toro the snow came down as far as Pine Canyon on one side and Jamesburg on the other. A six-legged calf was born in Carmel Valley. A cloud drifting in formed the letters O-N in the sky over Monterey. Mushrooms grew out of the concrete floor of the basement of the Methodist Church. Old Mr. Roletti, at the age of ninety-three, developed senile satyriasis and had to be forcibly restrained from chasing high-school girls. The spring was cold, and the rains came late. Velella[28] in their purple billions sailed into Monterey Bay and were cast up on the beaches, where they died. Killer whales attacked the sea lions near Seal Rocks and murdered a great number of them. Dr. Wick took a kidney stone out of Mrs. Gaston as big as your hand and shaped like a dog’s head, a beagle. The Lions’ Club announced a fifty-dollar prize for the best essay on “Football—Builder of Character.” And last, but far from least, the Sherman rose developed a carnation bud. Perhaps all this meant nothing; you never notice such things until afterward.

Monterey had changed, and so had Cannery Row and its denizens. As Mack said, “The tum-tum changes, giving place to new. And God tum-tums himself in many ways.”

Doc was changing in spite of himself, in spite of the prayers of his friends, in spite of his own knowledge. And why not? Men do change, and change comes like a little wind that ruffles the curtains at dawn, and it comes like the stealthy perfume of wildflowers hidden in the grass. Change may be announced by a small ache, so that you think you’re catching cold. Or you may feel a faint disgust for something you loved yesterday. It may even take the form of a hunger that peanuts will not satisfy. Isn’t overeating said to be one of the strongest symptoms of discontent? And isn’t discontent the lever of change?

Before the war Doc had lived a benign and pleasant life, which aroused envy in some gnat-bitten men. Doc made a living, as good a living as he needed or wanted, by collecting and preserving various marine animals and selling them to schools, colleges, and museums. He was able to turn affable and uncritical eyes on a world full of excitement. He combined the beauty of the sea with man’s loveliest achievement—music. Through his superb phonograph he could hear the angelic voice of the Sistine Choir[29] and could wander half lost in the exquisite masses of William Byrd.[30] He believed there were two human achievements that towered above all others: the Faust[31] of Goethe and the Art of the Fugue[32] of J. S. Bach. Doc was never bored. He was beloved and preyed on by his friends, and this contented him. For he remembered the words of Diamond Jim Brady[33] who, when told that his friends were making suckers of him, remarked, “It’s fun to be a sucker—if you can afford it.” Doc could afford it. He had not the vanity which makes men try to be smart.

Doc’s natural admiration and desire for women had always been satisfied by women themselves. He had few responsibilities except to be a kindly, generous, and amused man. And these he did not find difficult. All in all, he had always been a fulfilled and contented man. A specimen so rare aroused yearning in other men, for how few men like their work, their lives—how very few men like themselves. Doc liked himself, not in an adulatory sense, but just as he would have liked anyone else. Being at ease with himself put him at ease with the world.

In the Army there had been times when he longed for his music, for his little animals, and for the peace and interest of his laboratory. Coming home, forcing open the water-swollen door, was a pleasure and a pain to him. He sighed as he looked at his bookshelves. It took him ten minutes to decide which record to play first. And then the past was gone and he was faced with the future. Old Jingleballicks had kept the little business going in a manner even more inefficient than Doc had, and then had left it to founder. The stocks of preserved animals were depleted. The business contacts had lapsed. The bank that held his mortgage was no longer checked by patriotism. There was some question whether Doc could ever build back his marginal business. In the old days he would have forgotten such considerations in multiple pleasures and interests. Now discontent nibbled at him—not painfully, but constantly.

Where does discontent start? You are warm enough, but you shiver. You are fed, yet hunger gnaws you. You have been loved, but your yearning wanders in new fields. And to prod all these there’s time, the bastard Time. The end of life is now not so terribly far away—you can see it the way you see the finish line when you come into the stretch—and your mind says, “Have I worked enough? Have I eaten enough? Have I loved enough?” All of these, of course, are the foundation of man’s greatest curse, and perhaps his greatest glory. “What has my life meant so far, and what can it mean in the time left to me?” And now we’re coming to the wicked, poisoned dart: “What have I contributed in the Great Ledger? What am I worth?” And this isn’t vanity or ambition. Men seem to be born with a debt they can never pay no matter how hard they try. It piles up ahead of them. Man owes something to man. If he ignores the debt it poisons him, and if he tries to make payments the debt only increases, and the quality of his gift is the measure of the man.

Doc’s greatest talent had been his sense of paying as he went. The finish line had meant nothing to him except that he had wanted to crowd more living into the stretch. Each day ended with its night; each thought with its conclusion; and every morning a new freedom arose over the eastern mountains and lighted the world. There had never been any reason to suppose it would be otherwise. People made pilgrimages to the laboratory to bask in Doc’s designed and lovely purposelessness. For what can a man accomplish that has not been done a million times before? What can he say that he will not find in Lao-Tse[34] or the Bhagavadgita[35] or the Prophet Isaiah?[36] It is better to sit in appreciative contemplation of a world in which beauty is eternally supported on a foundation of ugliness: cut out the support, and beauty will sink from sight. It was a good thing Doc had, and many people wished they had it too.

But now the worm of discontent was gnawing at him. Maybe it was the beginning of Doc’s middle age that caused it—glands slackening their flow, skin losing its bloom, taste buds weakening, eyes not so penetrating, and hearing dulled a little. Or it might have been the new emptiness of Cannery Row—the silent machines, the rusting metal. Deep in himself Doc felt a failure. But he was a reasonably realistic man. He had his eyes examined, his teeth X-rayed. Dr. Horace Dormody[37] went over him and discovered no secret focus of infection to cause the restlessness. And so Doc threw himself into his work, hoping, the way a man will, to smother the unease with weariness. He collected, preserved, injected, until his stock shelves were crowded again. New generations of cotton rats crawled on the wire netting of the cages, and four new rattlesnakes abandoned themselves to a life of captivity and ease.

But the discontent was still there. The pains that came to Doc were like a stir of uneasiness or the flick of a skipped heartbeat. Whisky lost its sharp delight and the first long pull of beer from a frosty glass was not the joy it had been. He stopped listening in the middle of an extended story. He was not genuinely glad to see a friend. And sometimes, starting to turn over a big rock in the Great Tide Pool[38]—a rock under which he knew there would be a community of frantic animals—he would drop the rock back in place and stand, hands on hips, looking off to sea, where the round clouds piled up white with pink and black edges. And he would be thinking, What am I thinking? What do I want? Where do I want to go? There would be wonder in him, and a little impatience, as though he stood outside and looked in on himself through a glass shell. And he would be conscious of a tone within himself, or several tones, as though he heard music distantly.

Or it might be this way. In the late night Doc might be working at his old and battered microscope, delicately arranging plankton on a slide, moving them with a thread of glass. And there would be three voices singing in him, all singing together. The top voice of his thinking mind would sing, “What lovely little particles, neither plant nor animal but somehow both—the reservoir of all the life in the world, the base supply of food for everyone. If all of these should die, every other living thing might well die as a consequence.” The lower voice of his feeling mind would be singing, “What are you looking for, little man? Is it yourself you’re trying to identify? Are you looking at little things to avoid big things?” And the third voice, which came from his marrow, would sing, “Lonesome! Lonesome! What good is it? Who benefits? Thought is the evasion of feeling. You’re only walling up the leaking loneliness.”

Sometimes he would leave his work and walk out to the lighthouse to watch the white flail of light strike at the horizons. Once there, of course, his mind would go back to the plankton, and he would think, It’s a protein food of course. If I could find a way to release this food directly to humans, why, nobody in the world would have to go hungry again. And the bottom voice would sing, “Lonesome, lonesome! You’re trying to buy your way in.”

Doc thought he was alone in his discontent, but he was not. Everyone on the Row observed him and worried about him. Mack and the boys worried about him. And Mack said to Fauna, “Doc acts like a guy that needs a dame.”

“He can have the courtesy of the house anytime,” said Fauna.

“I don’t mean that,” said Mack. “He needs a dame around. He needs a dame to fight with. Why, that can keep a guy so goddam busy defending himself he ain’t got no time to blame himself.”

Fauna regarded marriage with a benevolent eye. Not only was it a desirable social condition, but it sent her some of her best customers.

“Well, let’s marry him off,” said Fauna.

“Oh no,” said Mack. “I wouldn’t go that far. My God! Not Doc!”

Doc tried to solve his problem in the ancient way. He took a long, leisurely trip to La Jolla, four hundred miles south. He traveled in the old manner, with lots of beer and a young lady companion whose interest in invertebrate zoology Doc thought might be flexible—and it was.

The whole trip was a success: weather calm and warm, tides low. Under the weed-wreathed boulders of the intertidal zone Doc found, by great good fortune, twenty-eight baby octopi with tentacles four or five inches long. It was a little bonanza for him if he could keep them alive. He handled them tenderly, put them in a wooden collecting bucket, and floated seaweed over them for protection. An excitement was growing in him.

His companion began to be a little disappointed. Doc’s enthusiasm for the octopi indicated that he was not as flexible as she. And no girl likes to lose center stage, particularly to an octopus. The four-hundred-mile trip back to Monterey was made in a series of short dashes, for Doc stopped every few miles to dampen the sack that covered the collecting bucket.

“Octopi can’t stand heat,” he said.

He recited no poetry to her. The subject of her eyes, her feelings, her skin, her thought, did not come up. Instead Doc told her about octopi—a subject that would have fascinated her two days before.

Doc said, “They’re wonderful animals, delicate and complicated and shy.”

“Ugly brutes,” said the girl.

“No, not ugly,” said Doc. “But I see why you say it. People have always been repelled and at the same time fascinated by octopi. Their eyes look baleful and cruel. And all kinds of myths have grown up around octopi too. You know the story of the kraken,[39] of course.”

“Of course,” she said shortly.

“Octopi are timid creatures really,” Doc said excitedly. “Most complicated. I’ll show you when I get them in the aquarium. Of course there can’t be any likeness, but they do have some traits that seem to be almost human. Mostly they hide and avoid trouble, but I’ve seen one deliberately murder another. They appear to feel terror too, and rage. They change color when they’re disturbed and angry, almost like the rage blush of a man.”

“Very interesting,” said the girl, and she tucked her skirt in around her knees.

Doc went on, “Sometimes they get so mad they collapse and die of something that parallels apoplexy. They’re highly emotional animals. I’m thinking of writing a paper about them.”

“You might find out what causes human apoplexy,” said the girl, and because he wasn’t listening for it, Doc didn’t hear the satire in her tone.

There’s no need for giving the girl a name. She never came back to Western Biological. Her interest in science blinked out like a candle, but a flame was lighted in Doc.

The flame of conception seems to flare and go out, leaving man shaken, and at once happy and afraid. There’s plenty of precedent of course. Everyone knows about Newton’s apple. Charles Darwin and his Origin of Species[40] flashed complete in one second, and he spent the rest of his life backing it up; and the theory of relativity occurred to Einstein in the time it takes to clap your hands. This is the greatest mystery of the human mind—the inductive leap. Everything falls into place, irrelevancies relate, dissonance becomes harmony, and nonsense wears a crown of meaning. But the clarifying leap springs from the rich soil of confusion, and the leaper is not unfamiliar with pain.

The girl said good-by and went away, and Doc did not know she was gone. For that matter he did not know she had been with him.

With infinite care Doc scrubbed out a big aquarium, carpeted it with sea sand, and laid in stones populated with sponges and hydroids and anemones. He planted seaweeds and caught little crabs and eels and tide-pool Johnnys. He carried buckets of sea water from the beach and set up a pump to circulate the water from tank to aquarium and back. He considered every factor within his knowledge—relations of plant and animal life, food, filtering, oxygenation. He built an octopus world within walls of glass, trying to anticipate every octopus need and to eliminate every octopus enemy or danger. He considered light and heat.

Eight of his octopi were dead, but the twenty living ones scuttled to the bottom of their new home and hid themselves, throbbing and blushing with emotion. Doc drew a stool close and peered into the little world he had made, and his mind was filled with cool green thoughts and stately figures. For the moment he was at peace. The pale expressionless eyes of the octopi seemed to be looking into his eyes.

In the days that followed, Doc’s disposition was so unpredictable that Mack exhausted every other possibility before he moved in on Western Biological for the two dollars he thought he needed.

Mack’s campaign was probably the most elaborate of his career. It began quietly, and only after a thorough preparation did it begin to take shape. Then spinnerets of emotion laced in and the heavy notes of tragic necessity began to be faintly heard. Drama grew, as it should, out of its inherent earth. Mack’s voice was controlled and soft—no trembling yet—just a reasonable, clear, but potentially passionate growth. Mack knew he was doing well. He could hear himself, and he knew that if he were on the receiving end he would find it impossible not to weaken. Why, then, did not Doc turn his eyes from the dimly lit aquarium? He had certainly said “hello” when Mack came in. A little shakily Mack cut in the vox angelica, the vox dolorosa, and finally a bendiga stupenda so moving that Mack himself was in tears.

Doc did not turn his head.

Mack stood stunned. It is a frightening thing to lay out everything you have, to finish, and have no response. He didn’t know what to do next. He said loudly, “Doc!”

“Hello,” said Doc.

“Don’t you feel good?”

“Sure, Mack. How much do you want?”

“Two dollars.”

Doc reached in his hip pocket for his wallet without lifting his eyes. Mack’s great performance had been wasted. He might just as well have simply come in and asked for the money. He knew he could never reach such a height again. A sudden anger came over him, and he considered refusing the money, but his natural good sense saved him. He stood there rolling the dollar bills between his fingers. “What’s got into you, Doc?” he said.

Doc turned slowly toward him. “There’s going to be one great difficulty,” he said. “How am I going to light them? It’s always a problem, but in this case it might be insuperable.”

“Light what, Doc?”

“We start with two obvious problems,” Doc continued. “First, they can’t stand heat, and second, they are to a certain extent photophobic. I don’t know how I’m going to get enough cold light on them. Would it be possible, do you suppose, to condition them, to light them constantly, so that the photophobia subsides?”

“Oh sure,” said Mack uneasily.

“Don’t be too sure,” said Doc. “The very process of conditioning might, if it did not kill them, change their normal reactions. It’s always difficult to evaluate responses that approximate emotions. If I place them in an abnormal situation, can I trust the response to be normal?”

“No,” said Mack.

“You cannot dissect for emotion,” Doc went on. “If a human body were found by another species and dissected, there would be no possible way of knowing about its emotions or its thoughts. Now, it occurs to me that the rage, or rather the symptom that seems like rage, must be fairly abnormal in itself. I have seen it happen in aquariums. Does it occur on the sea bottom? Is the observed phenomenon not perhaps limited to the aquarium? No, I can’t permit myself to believe that, or my whole thesis falls.”

“Doc!” Mack cried. “Look, Doc, it’s me—Mack!”

“Hello, Mack,” said Doc. “How much did you say?”

“You’ve already given it to me,” said Mack, and he felt like a fool the moment he’d said it.

“I need better equipment,” said Doc. “Goddam it, I can’t see without better equipment.”

“Doc, how’s about you and me stepping over and getting a half-pint of Old Tennis Shoes?”

“Fine,” said Doc.

“I’ll buy,” said Mack. “I’ve got a couple of loose bucks.”

Doc said sharply, “I’ll have to get some money. Where can I get some money, Mack?”

“I told you, I’ll buy, Doc.”

“I’ll need a wide-angle binocularscope and light. I’ll have to find out about light—maybe a pinpoint spot from across the room. No, they’d move out of that. Maybe there are new kinds of lights. I’ll have to look into it.”

“Come on, Doc.”

Doc bought a pint of Old Tennis Shoes and later sent Mack out with money to buy another pint. The two of them sat in the laboratory side by side, staring into the aquarium, resting their elbows on the shelf, and they got to the point where they were mixing a little water with the whisky.

“I got an uncle with an eye like them,” said Mack. “Rich old bastard too. I wonder why, when you get rich, you get a cold eye.”

“Self-protection,” said Doc solemnly. “Conditioned by relatives, I guess.”

“Like I was saying, Doc. Everybody in the Row is worried about you. You don’t have no fun. You wander around like you was lost.”

“I guess it’s reorientation,” said Doc.

“Well, some people think you need a dame to kind of nudge you out of it. I know a guy that every time he gets feeling low he goes back to his wife. Makes him appreciate what he had. He goes away again and feels just fine.”

“Shock therapy,” said Doc. “I’m all right, Mack. Don’t let anybody give me a wife though—don’t let them give me a wife! I guess a man needs a direction. That’s what I’ve been needing. You can only go in circles so long.”

“I kind of like it that way,” said Mack.

“I’m going to call my paper ‘Symptoms in Some Cephalopods Approximating Apoplexy.’ ”

“Great God Almighty!” said Mack.