The rat on fire

11

Wilfrid Mack sat on the aluminium chair with the yellow plastic covering, in Mavis Davis’s kitchen at 25 Bristol Street. She was in her late forties. She wore a red jersey dress which showed that she had kept her figure, and an expression of weariness.

“Mister Mack,” she said, “it’s nice of you to come, and I appreciate it. But I don’t know what you or anybody else can do. You know it just as well as I do – Alfred goes off half-cocked. I’ve tried everything I could think of, to do with him. It didn’t work. His sister’s a fine lady and she works very hard. I get out of bed every morning and go down to the hospital and talk to the people all day on the telephone, the ones who haven’t paid their bills any more’n I have, and then I come home at night with a bag of groceries that I can’t afford and I cook dinner on a stove that doesn’t work right. Selene eats fast and goes to work, and if Alfred’s in the mood, he gets up and eats before he goes down to work for Walter all night long. The plumbing backs up and the owner won’t fix it. You can’t even get Mister Fein on the telephone. Two guys came over here the other day, one of the neighbours was telling me, and went into the cellar with a lot of tools, and then they went right out again. They didn’t do anything. If I fill that sink up with water right now, and you sit here and wait for it to go out, you won’t get anything done tomorrow.

“Just as soon,” she said, “just as soon as I start to think that I am making some progress and there must be some way that an apartment with three people in it, all of them working, can have something like a decent life for themselves and send their kids to school, or maybe just go out to a movie, something happens. We don’t have a car, but we do have lamps. They burn out bulbs. Last week, the summer here and everything, I figured Selene would be working full-time and lots of nights I could walk home or take the subway instead of spending all that money on cabs, and I went out and put thirty dollars down on an air conditioner.

“Mister Mack,” she said, “I don’t know how I’m going to pay for that air conditioner. I just wanted one cool room and I put thirty dollars down, and this week I got a letter that the taxes went up and the heating oil went up and my share of those things is going to just wipe out my air conditioner.

“If you want to look out that window,” she said, “you can. This is the third floor and the back yard’s full of junk. You can pull that chair over there and look right out and see a yard that’s full of junk that people threw away but nobody ever bothered to pick up. You can even get a little breeze over there, if you can stand looking at the junk. But it’d be a good idea if you didn’t tilt too far back in the chair because the back legs’re a little shaky. And don’t lean on the table either. We don’t get good meat very often, but when we do it’s hell cutting it because the table’s so wobbly. I keep this stuff, Mister Mack, because I can’t afford anything better. I make twelve thousand dollars a year and both my kids work, but Alfred gives me nothing and Selene buys her own stuff. If I want an air conditioner, I have to eat on a wobbly table, and now I’m probably going to lose my thirty dollars that I put down on an air conditioner. You politicians. If you don’t mind me saying so, you make me sick.”

“Look,” Mack said, “I’m only a state legislator, ma’am. There’re some limits to what I can do. I don’t set the price of oil and I don’t set the city tax rate. I can’t make the man clean up the yard and I can’t do anything about the heat and the humidity. Give me a break, lady.”

“Mister Mack,” she said, “you asked me a question. You asked me about Alfred and why I don’t calm him down and let his sister solve her own problems. You asked me that. I just told you why I can’t do that. You didn’t listen to me.

“Alfred’s got a temper. I don’t know where he got it. His father sure didn’t have one. He never showed it, if he did. All he ever did was smile and say he would think of something to do about it, but he never did. Until the day he thought of something finally, and he did it. He ran away. That was Roosevelt’s way of doing something. Maybe he was right. He was no good at this business of getting along with other people and enough to eat and a place to sleep that was warm in the winter and at least so you could breathe in the summer. He was a nice man, but he liked to have his glass of beer and he almost always had fifty cents to go sit in the bleachers at the Red Sox game. He went to work at the fine offices downtown and he reported every night. He washed the floors and he waxed the floors. At Christmas, sometimes, one of the professional gentlemen would have his secretary give Roosevelt a fifth of cheap whiskey. He would give me a new nightgown and the kids would get one toy each, and everybody was happy.

“He was happy because he didn’t have to do very much, and they were happy with one toy because they were little then and they weren’t seeing what all the other kids were getting. I was happy because where we were living then was damned cold in the winter and I needed a new nightgown. A new flannel nightgown that would be nice and warm for me until it wore out in April, because those were cheap nightgowns Roosevelt bought, Mister Mack. They were very cheap nightgowns. Roosevelt was polite to everybody, and he was mostly a happy man, at least when I knew him, but when the kids started gettin’ bigger, and noticed more things, and I grew up a little myself, we started talking to him. Maybe we talked too much, Mister Mack. Maybe we gave Roosevelt more trouble than he could handle. Maybe Roosevelt found out he might have been a happy man, and he might have been a nice man, but we didn’t think he was a very good man. And he wasn’t. And we didn’t.

“The trouble is,” she said, “the man the kids got, when Roosevelt left, turned out to be me. I am not even as good a man as Roosevelt was. I am not even a man at all. I am a woman whose husband ran off on her and left her with two kids and no way to make a living and not much chance of finding another man who would be better, that was in the market for a woman with two kids that had had a man and lost him. So I was more or less forced to take over where Roosevelt left off.

“I was dumb enough,” she said, “to think that I could do it better. And I was right. I did do it better. But it wasn’t better enough. Roosevelt wasn’t ever around much anyway, so the kids didn’t really miss him and his one toy apiece at Christmas, but until he left and I had to go work, I was around. And then all of a sudden, I wasn’t. I was out making a living for us, and they were pretty much stuck with themselves.

“Don’t get me wrong,” she said. “Those kids did well. If you think about it they did very well. But that’s when you think about it. I did make more than Roosevelt did, and I brought it home. But every time I made a little more, somebody who was selling things I had to have charged me a little more. I kept on doing better, but nothing got better. We were still right where we started, only I was working harder and harder to keep us there.

“That’s what’s the matter with Alfred,” she said. “He looks around this place with the cracked linoleums on the floor and the busted screens and the plumbing that clogs up, and he looks out that window at all the junk. He knows about the rats and bugs, and he knows the air conditioner went to pay the tax amp; and fuel adjustment, and he gets mad. Alfred’s not a bad boy, Mister Mack, even though he did do time. He’s frustrated, but the things that frustrate him are things that he can’t do anything about and I can’t either, so he picks out this guy Peters and gets mad at him.

“I know Donald Peters,” she said. “I haven’t seen him for a long time, but back when I still lived with the kids in Roxbury, I used to see Donald’s mother all the time at church. Irma Peters, her name was. She always looked tired, and I suppose I always looked tired, and that was probably why we started talking. We used to chat now and then when we would see each other on the street, and after a while I found out that her husband Richard was chasing every skirt in town and she never did know where he was. And her son Donald does the same thing.

“Now,” Mavis Davis said, “there isn’t anything I can do to stop Donald from chasing after my little daughter’s ass. I wish there were, but there is not. Selene is a young lady now, and she is having thoughts. I have explained to her about older fellows like Donald, and what it is that interests them, and how long they will remain interested in it, after they get it. I believe she understood what I was saying. I do not believe she knows what it means. There is no way I can tell her what it means. Maybe she takes after her mother the same way that Donald takes after his father, and she needs a little experience of her own before she understands what is going on, and what it means. You may not think much of Officer Peters, Mister Mack, and I guess I don’t, myself, but Officer Peters is not the first man who took a look at some young honey and decided he might like to try a little of that. Nor will he be the last one. I’d like it better if he landed his eye on somebody else’s girl child, but he picked mine and there is nothing I can do about it except tell her that I see her doing up the top three buttons on her uniform blouse when she comes up the street at night and she might have less trouble with Officer Peters if she kept them done up in the first place, the way they were when she left the house.

“Alfred,” she said, “Alfred does not know about things like that. Alfred knows that he wants to get into every pair of pants that he sees on a woman, and he thinks that is perfectly all right and the way things should be. He does it all the time, as much of the time as he can anyway, and he thinks that is all right. He does not understand that the pants he gets into are being worn by young women who want him in there as much as he wants to be in there. He thinks he gets in there because he is handsome and charming, and they cannot resist him.

“Officer Peters, as far as Alfred is concerned, is raping Selene. Alfred does not approve of Selene having a man, or of a man having Selene. That is not what bothers him the most, so he starts in on Donald Peters. Alfred doesn’t know he can’t do anything about Peters, either, and neither can you.”

“Well,” Mack said, getting up, “I guess that pretty much covers it then. There isn’t anything I can do.”

“Well,” she said, “there might be. You might speak to Mister Fein about this rathole that we live in. That would be a help.”