The Victim

16

MR MILLIKAN, who attended to make-up at the printer”s, was representing the firm at an all-industry conference, and Leventhal, at midday, had to go to the shop in Brooklyn Heights to replace him.

He waited on the subway platform in the dead brown air, feeling spent. He did not know how he was going to get through the day. The train rolled up and he sat down spiritlessly under the slow-wheeling fan that stirred the heat. Again and again he thought about the child’s death. So soon closed over, covered up. So soon. He repeated it involuntarily while his head rocked with the bucketing of the cars in the long pull under the river that ended below the St George Hotel. He left the train and rode up to the street level in the elevator.

Millikan had made up four pages, leaving him four more. The work went slowly; he became drowsy and made mistakes and tedious recounts. Toward four o’clock, he began to drop off. “It’s the machine,” he thought. The presses were upstairs and they ran without interruption all day. He took time out for a walk. It was curious that he should feel so dull and heavy, and yet at the same time so apprehensive.

He went into a restaurant for a cup of coffee. The chairs were standing on the tables and a boy with a red, bluff head and freckled, rolling shoulders was mopping the tiles. The waitress made a detour of the advancing line of dirty water to ask Leventhal to move out of the way. He drank his coffee at the counter, wiped his mouth on the oblong of a paper napkin he did not bother to unfold, loitered through the lobby of the St George, examining a few magazines, and returned to the shop. Contemplating the pages with their blank spaces, he sighed and picked up the scissors. The presses had stopped before he was done. At half-past six he pasted his last strip and rubbed his hands clean with a piece of wastepaper.

On his way to dinner, he stopped at his flat to look in the mailbox. There was a note from Mary saying that she was writing a long letter which she expected to mail in a day or two. Disappointed, he slipped the note into his shirt pocket. He did not go upstairs. Near the corner he met Nunez, in his dungarees and straw hat, carrying a webbed market bag full of groceries.

“Eh, eh, hey! How are you, Mr Leventhal? I see you got yourself some company while your wife is away.”

“How do you know?” said Leventhal.

“Us supers, we keep track of everything around a building. We’re supposed to be nosey. That’s not what it is, you find out even if you don’t care. You can’t help it. The tenants get surprised. Brujo, I see through the wall. They don’t know, eh?” He described a spiral with his fingers, enjoying himself greatly. “No. You go out in the morning and then I hear your radio play. This afternoon the dumb-waiter goes up to the fourth floor. Later on, what’s in it? — A empty soup can and rye bottle.”

“So that’s what he’s doing?” thought Leventhal. “Guzzling all day. That’s what I let him in for.” He said to Nunez, “I’ve got a friend staying with me.”

“Oh, I don’t care who you got.” Nunez gave a suggestive laugh and wrinkled his nose with pleasure, the veins on his forehead puffing out.

“Who do you think I’ve got?”

“That’s okay. The way the dumb-waiter went up, there was no lady pulling on the rope, I know that. Don’t worry.” He swung the bag with his big-jointed, muscular arm tattooed with a bleeding heart. Leventhal continued toward the restaurant. “No money for rent,” he said going down the stairs and bending under the awning. “But for hooch he has it. For hooch he can raise it. Where?” It occurred to him that Allbee had stolen some article from the house and pawned it. But what valuables were there? Mary’s sealskin coat was in storage. Spoons? The silver was not worth stealing. Clothing? But a pawnbroker would be running a great risk, seeing how Allbee was dressed, to deal with him. No, hockshops had to think of their licenses. Leventhal did not really fear for his clothes. He had a tweed suit sealed in a mothproof bag in his closet; the rest was not worth pawning. And the suit was a small enough price to pay for getting rid of Allbee. Allbee was certainly clever enough to realize that. Drunks, of course, when they were thirsty enough, desperate enough, turned reckless. “But it isn’t the few bucks he’s after,” Leventhal reasoned. For he had already offered him money. Allbee must have some of his own, since he could afford to buy whisky. Then what about his being evicted, was that an invention? But what of his appearance, that filthy suit of his, his shirt, his long hair? Leventhal tentatively concluded that he kept a little money for whisky by economizing on rent and other things. “But I better lock up the valuables, meanwhile,” he told himself.

He ate a small dinner of baked veal overseasoned with thyme, had a glass of iced tea with sandy, undissolved sugar, and lit a cigar. Max and the family had replaced Allbee in his mind. Should he phone? Not just now, not tonight — he busily supplied good excuses, flinching a little at the shadow of his own weakness which lay behind them. He knew it was there. But this was not really the time to call. Later, when things had settled down, Max would soon find out — assuming that Elena’s last look in the chapel signified what he thought it did — what he had on his hands. Though perhaps there was nothing so unusual in that look under the circumstances. Perhaps — Leventhal studied the seam in the long ash of his cigar — he had let his imagination run away with him. Grief, overloading of the heart… “Horror, you know,” he silently explained. People crying when their faces were twisted might appear to be laughing, and so on. “Well, I hope to God I’m wrong,” he said. “I hope I am. And if he can run the old woman out of the house, maybe they can come through.” The boy’s death ought to bring the family closer together, at least. The old woman’s influence on Elena was bad; and now especially she could work round her. For Philip’s sake, Max ought to show the old devil the door. With her cooking and housekeeping she might try, at a time like this, to make herself a power in the house. He must impress the danger of this on Max, who might be inclined to let her stay. “Throw her out, don’t give her a chance!” Leventhal exclaimed. If Max came to rely on her, why… And he might, if it freed him, go where he liked and leave Philip in her hands. No, she must be pitched out. He sat awhile at his gloomy corner table, his black eyes giving very little evidence of the gloomy anxiety that filled him.

At home he took off his jacket in the vestibule. Through the window, in the clear depth over the wandering brown smoke and the low-lying red of twilight clouds, he saw the evening star. He went through the narrow kitchen into the dining-room, which was empty. Coming back to the front room, he was not immediately aware of Allbee’s presence. It was only after he had dropped into a chair beside the window that he discovered him sitting between the desk and the corner, and he cried out fiercely, “What’s the big idea!”

He shot up and turned on the desk lamp. His hands were shaking.

“I was enjoying the evening.”

“My foot, the evening,” Leventhal grumbled. “Drunken bastard!”

He was stubbornly silent, after this, determined that Allbee should speak first. The electric clock whirred swiftly. Allbee’s head lay on the back of the chair, his large legs were thrown wide apart, their weight supported on his heels. His hands, loose-wristed, were folded on his chest. After some time he moved a little and sighed, “This killing heat, it takes my energy away.”

“It couldn’t be something besides heat that takes it away, could it?”

“What-?”

“Whisky,” Leventhal said. “You’re supposed to be looking for work. What have you been doing? Sitting here, drinking? When you came I understood you were going to get something to do and find yourself a room.”

Allbee brought his head forward.

“I don’t want to rush into anything,” he said beginning to smile. “In any deal — you know that, you must know it by instinct — the worst thing of all is to hurry. Before you make up your mind… if you settle for buttons, peanuts… You have to think things over,” he ended with an unsteady, delighted, foolish look of self-congratulation. Was he drunk? Leventhal wondered.

“You, a deal,” he said contemptuously. “What kind of a deal have you got?”

“Oh, I might have. I might have something.”

“Furthermore, how do you get in and out of here? I locked the door last night. I’m sure I locked it.”

“I hope you don’t mind. There were some keys in the kitchen and one of them fitted.”

Leventhal scowled. Had Mary forgotten her key? Or was this an extra? “Originally the agent gave us two,” he thought, “and the mailbox keys and the key to the locker in the basement. Or were there three house keys?”

“I wasn’t sure I was coming back,” said Allbee. “But as long as there was a possibility of it, I thought it would be more convenient to have a key. I tried to call you at your office yesterday, but you weren’t in.”

“Don’t start bothering me at the office,” Leventhal said excitedly. “What did you want?”

“I wanted to ask your permission about the key, for one thing. And then there was something else that occurred to me, that on an outside chance there was an opening for someone like me at Beard and Company, and I might apply. You’re in a position to help me there.”

“At Beard’s? — It didn’t just occur to you! I don’t believe it.”

“It did so,” Allbee quickly began, but stopped. His large full lips were parted and his loud breathing suggested repressed laughter; he looked at him with comic curiosity. But, seeing him stare back, he started over again, more seriously. “No, it did, it struck me all of a sudden as I was eating breakfast. ‘Why shouldn’t Leventhal help me get a job at his place?’ And it’s fair enough, isn’t it? I introduced you to Rudiger. We won’t count what happened. We’ll forget about it. Let’s think of it only as a return courtesy. You make an appointment with Mr Beard for me — does he do the hiring over there in person? — and we’ll be square.”

“They don’t need anybody.”

“Let me find that out for myself.”

“Anyway, they couldn’t give you the type of job you want.”

“But you don’t care what kind of job I want. It wouldn’t make any difference to you, what,” he said grinning. “Whether I became a dish washer or scavenger, or hired myself out as human bait.”

“No, it wouldn’t, that’s true,” Leventhal replied.

“Then why should you worry about the type of work they offer me at your place?”

“Didn’t I hear you talking about a deal?” said Leventhal. He went to the mantel, fumbled for a cigarette in a jar, and, sitting down, slid his hand across the window sill toward the packet of matches lying in the ash tray. Allbee watched him.

“You know, when I see how your mind works, I actually feel sorry for you,” he said finally.

Leventhal pulled deeply at the cigarette; it stuck to his lips and he plucked it away.

“Look, the answer is a straight no. Never mind the discussion. I have plenty of trouble as it is. Skip the discussions.” His self-possession was temporary, like a reflection in water that may be wiped out at the first swell.

“I understand. You’re afraid I’ll turn around and do to you what you did to me at Dill’s. You think I want to go there and retaliate by getting you fired. But your introduction isn’t necessary. I can make trouble for you without it.”

“Go ahead.”

“You know I can.”

“Well, do!” he began to be shaken by the swells. “You think the job is so valuable to me? I can live without it. So do your worst. Hell with it all!”

“I took Williston’s word about you. He said you were all right, so I made the appointment for you with Rudiger. See? I wasn’t suspicious. It’s not in my make-up, I’m happy to say. I didn’t even know who you were, except from seeing you a few times at his parties.”

“I feel too low to horse around with you, Allbee. I’m willing to help you out. I told you so already. But as far as having you in the same office where I could see you every day — no! As it is, there are plenty of people over there I don’t care to see every day. You’d fit in with them better than I do. I don’t have any choice about them. But I do about you. So it’s out of the question. No! — and finished. I couldn’t stand it.”

Allbee seemed to be considering something in Leventhal’s words that pleased him, for his smile deepened.

“Yes,” he admitted. “You don’t have to have me around. And you’re right. I think you really are right. You have a choice. I envy you, Leventhal. Because when it came to the important things in my life, I never had the chance to choose. I didn’t want my wife to die. And if I could have chosen, she wouldn’t have left me. I didn’t choose to be stabbed in the back at Dill’s either.”

“Who! I stabbed you in the back?” Leventhal furiously said, making a fist.

“I didn’t choose to be fired by Rudiger, do you like that better? Anyway, you’re in an independent position and I’m not.” He was already falling into that tone of speculative earnestness that Leventhal detested. “Now I believe that luck… there really is such a thing as luck and those who do and don’t have it. In the long run, I don’t know who’s better off. It must make things very unreal to have luck all the time. But it’s a blessing, in some things, and especially if it gives you the chance to make a choice. That doesn’t come very often, does it? For most people? No, it doesn’t. It’s hard to accept that, but we have to accept it. We don’t choose much. We don’t choose to be born, for example, and unless we commit suicide we don’t choose the time to die, either. But having a few choices in between makes you seem less of an accident to yourself. It makes you feel your life is necessary. The world’s a crowded place, damned if it isn’t. It’s an overcrowded place. There’s room enough for the dead. Even they get buried in layers, I hear. There’s room enough for them because they don’t want anything. But the living… Do you want anything? Is there anything you want? There are a hundred million others who want that very same damn thing. I don’t care whether it’s a sandwich or a seat in the subway or what. I don’t know exactly how you feel about it, but I’ll say, speaking for myself, it’s hard to believe that my life is necessary. I guess you wouldn’t be familiar with the Catholic catechism where it asks, ‘For whom was the world made?’ Something along that line. And the answer is, ‘For man.’ For every man? Yes, for every last mother’s son. Every man. Precious to God, if you please, and made for His greater glory and given the whole blessed earth. Like Adam. He called the beasts by their names and they obeyed him. I wish I could do that. Now that’s clever. For everybody who repeats ‘For man’ it means ‘For me.’ ‘The world was created for me, and I am absolutely required, not only now, but forever. And it’s all for me, forever.’ Does that make sense?”

He put the question with an unfinished flourish and Leven-thal looked at his sweating face and only now realized how drunk he was.

“Who wants all these people to be here, especially forever? Where’re you going to put them all? Who has any use for them all? Look at all the lousy me’s the world was made for and I share it with. Love thy neighbor as thyself? Who the devil is my neighbor? I want to find out. Yes, sir, who and what? Even if I wanted to hate him as myself, who is he? Like myself? God help me if I’m like what I see around. And as for eternal life, I’m not letting you in on any secret when I say most people count on dying. .”

Leventhal had an impulse to laugh. “Don’t be so noisy,” he said. “I can’t help it if the world is too crowded for you, but pipe down.”

Allbee also laughed, strenuously, with a staring expression; his entire face was distended. He cried out thickly, “Hot stars and cold hearts, that’s your universe!”

“Stop yelling. That’s plenty, now. You’d better go to sleep. Go and sleep it off.”

“Oh, good old Leventhal! Kindhearted Leventhal, you deep Hebrew..”

“Enough, stop it!” Leventhal interrupted.

Allbee obeyed, though he went on grinning. From time to time he released a pent-up breath and he sank deeper into the armchair.

“Are you really going to do something for me?” he said.

“You’ve got to stop the tricks, first of all.”

“Oh, I don’t want to see old man Beard,” Allbee assured him. “I won’t bother you up there, if that’s what you mean.”

“You’ve got to try to do something about yourself.”

“But will you really try? You know, use your connections for me?”

“For the love of Mike, I can’t do much. And as long as you behave the way you do…”

“Yes, you’re right. I’ve got to get next to myself. I have to change. I intend to. I mean it.”

“You see that yourself, don’t you?”

“Of course I do. Don’t you think I’ve got any sense at all? I must take myself in hand before everything wriggles away from me… get back to what I was when Flora was alive. I feel worthless. I know what I am. Worthless.” Delirious tears came to his eyes. “There were good things in me.” He struggled and fumbled, half revolting in the fervor of his self-abasement, but half — ah, half you could not help feeling sorry. “Williston will tell you. Flora would if she was here to speak and forgive me. I think she would. She loved me. You can see how I’ve come down if I talk to you like this. If she were alive, it wouldn’t hurt me so much to be a failure.”

“Ah, quit —!”

“I’d still be ashamed, but at least I wouldn’t have so much to blame myself for.”

“You? You hypocrite, you’d never blame yourself in a thousand years. I know your type.”

“I am to blame. I know it. My darling!” He put the heel of his hand to his wet forehead, spread his mouth open crudely, and wept.

Leventhal regarded him with a kind of dismayed pity. He rose and stood wondering what to do.

“The thing to do is to make him coffee, I suppose,” he decided. He hurried to fill the pot and, striking a match, held it to the burner. The flames spurted up in the star-shaped rows. He tapped the jar with the spoon and measured out the coffee.

When he came back to the front room, Allbee was asleep. He shouted, “Wake up, I’m fixing coffee for you.” He clapped his hands and shook him. Finally he lifted one of his lids and looked at his eye. “Passed out,” he said. And he thought with grim distaste, “Can I let him stay here like this? He may slide out of the chair and lie on the floor all night.” The idea of spending the night like that, with Allbee on the floor and perhaps waking up, frightened him somewhat. Besides, he was beginning to be aware of the disgusting smell of alcohol that came from him. He hauled Allbee from the chair and began to drag him from the room. At the kitchen door he lifted him onto his back, holding him by the wrists, and he carried him to the dining-room and dropped him onto the day bed.