Very Old Bones

One

It is Saturday, July twenty-sixth, 1958, the sun will rise in about twenty-five minutes, the air is still, and even the birds are not yet awake on Colonie Street. There is no traffic on North Pearl Street, half a block to the east, except for the occasional auto, police prowl car, or the Second Avenue bus marking its hourly trail. A moment ago fire sirens sounded on upper Arbor Hill, to the west, their wail carrying down on the silent air, interrupting the dreams of the two sleeping occupants of this house, Peter Phelan, a seventy-one-year-old artist, and his putative son, Orson Purcell, a thirty-four-year-old bastard.

“Orson,” Peter called out, “where are those sirens?”

“Not around here,” I said.

“Good.”

He knew as well as I that the sirens weren’t close. His hearing was excellent. But he was reassuring himself that in case of fire Orson was standing by; for I was now the organizer of his life (not his art; he was in full command of that), the putative son having become father to the putative father. His health was precarious, a serious heart condition that might take him out at any instant; and so he abdicated all responsibility for survival and gave himself utterly to his work. I could now hear him moving, sitting up on the side of the bed in his boxer shorts, reaching for the light and for his cane, shoving his feet into his slippers, readying himself to enter his studio and, by the first light of new morning, address his work-in-progress, a large painting he called The Burial.

I knew my sleep was at an end on this day, and as I brought myself into consciousness I recapitulated what I could remember of my vanishing dream: Peter in a gymnasium where a team of doctors had just operated on him and were off to the right conferring about the results, while the patient lay on the operating table, only half there. The operation had consisted of sawing parts off Peter, the several cuts made at the hip line (his arthritic hips were his enemy), as steaks are cut off a loin. These steaks lay in a pile at the end of Peter’s table. He was in some pain and chattering to me in an unintelligible language. I reattached the most recent cut of steak to his lower extremity, and it fit perfectly in its former location. But when I let go of it it fell back atop its fellows. Peter did not seem to notice either my effort or its failure.

“Are you going to have coffee, Orson?” he called out from his room. In other words, are you going to make my breakfast?

“I am,” I said. “Couple of minutes.” And I snapped on the light and sat up from the bed, naked, sweating in the grotesque heat of the morning. I put on a light robe and slippers and went down the front stairs and retrieved the morning Times-Union from the front porch. Eisenhower sending marines into Lebanon for mid-east crisis. Thunderstorms expected today. Rockefeller front runner for Republican nomination for Governor.

I put the paper on the dining-room table, filled the percolator, put out coffee cups and bread plates, and began plotting the day ahead, a day of significance to the family that had occupied this house since the last century. We would be gathering, the surviving Phelans and I, at the request of Peter, who was obeying a patriarchal whim that he hoped would redirect everybody’s life. My principal unfinished task, apart from ridding the house of clutter, was to inveigle my cousin Billy to attend the gathering here, a place he loathed.

I first came here in 1934 for a funeral. Peter passed me off as the son of his landlady, Claire Purcell (which I was and am), whom he had never brought to this house even for tea, though he had been living with her then in Greenwich Village for more than fifteen years. I liked Albany, liked the relatives, especially my Aunt Molly, who became my nurse after I went crazy for the second time, and I liked Billy, who always tried to tell the truth about himself, a dangerous but admirable trait. I went to college in Albany before and after the war and came here for dinner now and again, slowly getting to know this ancestral place and its inhabitants: the Phelans and the McIlhennys, their loves, their work, their disasters.

I came to see how disaster does not always enter the house with thunder, high winds, and a splitting of the earth. Sometimes it burrows under the foundation and, like a field mouse on tiptoe, and at its own deliberate speed, gnaws away the entire substructure. One needs time to see this happening, of course, and eventually I had plenty of that.

Colonie Street in Arbor Hill was the neighborhood where these people had implanted their lives in the last century. The first Phelans arrived from Ireland in the 1820s to finish digging the Erie Canal and by mid-century were laborers, lumbermen, railroad men, and homemakers of modestly expanding means. The McIlhennys came in the late 1870s, poor as turkeys and twice as wild.

Michael Phelan inherited twenty-one thousand dollars upon the death of his father, a junior partner in a lumber mill, and in 1879 Michael built this house for his bride, Kathryn McIlhenny, creating what then seemed a landmark mansion (it was hardly that) on a nearly empty block: two parlors, a dining room, and seven bedrooms, those bedrooms an anticipatory act of notable faith and irony, for, after several years of marriage, Kathryn began behaving like an all-but-frigid woman. In spite of this, the pair filled the bedrooms with four sons and three daughters, the seven coming to represent, in my mind, Michael Phelan’s warm-blooded perseverance in the embrace of ice.

The siblings were Peter and Molly; the long-absent Francis; the elder sister, Sarah; the dead sister, Julia; the failed priest, Chick; and the holy moron, Tommy. Peter had fled the house in the spring of 1913, vowing never to live here again. But the family insinuated itself back into his life after a death in the family, and he came home to care for the remnant kin, Molly and Tommy.

Peter’s pencil sketches of his parents and siblings (but none of his putative son) populated the walls of the downstairs rooms in places Peter thought appropriate: Francis in his baseball uniform when he played for Washington, hanging beside the china closet, the scene of a major crisis in his life; Julia in her bathing costume, standing in the ankle-deep ocean at Atlantic City, where her mother took her to spend two months of the summer of 1909, hoping to hasten her recovery from rheumatic fever with sea air, this sketch hanging over the player piano; Sarah, without pince-nez, in high-necked white blouse, looking not pretty, for that wasn’t possible for the willfully plain Sarah, but with an appealing benevolence that Peter saw in her, this sketch hanging on the east wall of the front parlor, close to the bric-a-brac Sarah had accumulated through the years, the only non-practical gifts the family ever gave her; for her horizon of pleasure in anything but the pragmatic was extremely limited. Molly hung in the back parlor also, with one foot on the running board of her new 1937 Dodge, looking very avant-garde for that year.

Peter sketched Chick at sixteen, in the black suit, Panama hat, and priestly collar he wore in the seminary, and hung the sketch in the front hallway, next to the autographed photo of Bishop T. M. A. Burke, former pastor of St. Joseph’s, whose sermon in 1900, on the fortieth anniversary of the church, inspired the fourteen-year-old Chick to devote his already pious life unreservedly to God. The parental sketches hung between the two windows of the dining room: Kathryn in the laundry of St. Peter’s Hospital on Broadway, which she worked in as a girl, then supervised for three years until the birth of Peter, after which she never worked; and Michael in his coveralls, at trackside with his gandy dancers, and with the same engine that killed him sitting benignly on the tracks behind him.

Only Tommy’s sketch was upstairs (Peter did numerous self-portraits but hung none of them), hanging in his old room, which I occupied when I moved in to take care of Peter. Tommy is moon-faced and young and has already gone bald in the sketch, and his mouth is screwed rightward in a smile that makes him look both happy and brainless at the same time. Sarah was Tommy’s caretaker, and though Tommy went to work every day as a sweeper in the North Albany (water) Filtration Plant, a major achievement in coherence for Tom, Sarah viewed it otherwise. She had a theme: “Oh God let me outlive Tommy, for he can’t survive alone.” But then she died and Tommy didn’t, and Peter became his brother’s keeper.

This was in the fall of 1954 and Peter was nearly destitute, a recurring condition; and so he welcomed a place to live rent-free. He moved up from Greenwich Village and settled back into the homestead. His old bedroom fronted on Colonie Street and, because its three bay windows offered the best light in the house, he turned it into his studio. He took down all the drapes, curtains, and dark green shades with which his mother and Sarah had kept out the light of the world for so long, and by so doing he let in not only the sunshine but also the nonplussed gazes of Arbor Hill rubbernecks who went out of their way to watch crazy old Peter Phelan, artist without a shirt, standing morning and afternoon with his expansive back to the open windows, forever dabbing paint onto his great canvases. Not like it used to be, the Phelan place.

When I moved into Tommy’s room I swept out the cobwebs and dingbats, took off the old Tommy bedclothes, heavy with dust, and discovered the Tommy treasure under the bed: dozens of packages just as they’d been when he’d bought them at Whitney’s and Myers’ and other Downtown stores where he spent his wages. I opened one box and found white kid gloves, size four, petite, lovely, brand new in white tissue paper; opened another and found a beige slip with lace bodice; opened a third, a fourth, found pink panties, a pink brassiere.

“He gave them away to ladies,” Peter told me. “He did that all his life until he ran out of ladies.”

Did you buy on spec, Tom, you old dog? Did you then walk the town till you found the hand, the bodice, the thighs that fit the garment?

— Excuse me, ma’am, but I bought you a little gift.

— A gift, for me? Who are you? I don’t know you.

— That’s all right, ma’am, you don’t have to know me.

And you tip your cap and move on, leaving the woman holding the bra.

“The three Foley sisters up the street,” Peter said. “They were his ladies before the war.” And I tried to imagine what they gave Tommy in return for his gifts. Did they model the garment? Give him a bit of stocking, a bit of white thigh? Could he have handled more? Whatever the Foley sights, they were not unfamiliar sights to many men in Arbor Hill, or so Peter said. But then one day Tommy’s Tommy-love went unrequited by all Foleys — the sap bereft — and the gifts piled up under the bed.

I began to create this memoir five years ago among the pines and hemlocks of a summer hotel on the shore of Saratoga Lake, not knowing what its design would be. It began as a work of memory, passed through stages of fantasy, and emerged, I hope, as an act of the imagination. Freud wrote of imaginative artists that they could, through artistic illusion, produce emotional effects that seemed real, and so, he said, they could justly be compared to magicians.

Never mind art or justice, but I am a bit of a magician, having been exposed to the wisdom of the hand, the innocence of the eye, at an early age: when my mother was an assistant to Manfredo the Magnificent, a mediocre illusionist in the age of vaudeville. But I also learned magic by studying Peter Phelan, for, while Manfredo played tricks on the gullible, fantasy-ridden public, Peter pursued freedom from cheap illusion and untrustworthy instincts by trying for a lifetime to find magic in what was real in the world and in his heart, ultimately reaching a depth of the self that others rarely achieve. I tried this myself, went through my theatrical double breakdowns in Germany and Manhattan in the process, and have now produced this cautionary tale of diseased self-contemplation — my own and others’.

I’ve often used my talent as a magician, that is as a card manipulator, to entertain, but only rarely for personal gain. The first time I did that I was finishing my bachelor’s degree at Albany State after the war and found myself welcome at the tables of Fobie McManus’s blackout poker game on Sheridan Avenue.

Fobie was a mean-spirited erstwhile burglar who ran a saloon that catered chiefly to newspaper people. He furnished them with drink and warmth until closing, then offered them the solace of dollar-limit poker until dawn. I was working weekends as a nightside rewrite man on the Times-Union, trying to pay my tuition. But the wages were puny and I would’ve quit if I hadn’t discovered Fobie’s game.

It was peopled with printers, reporters, and copy editors who fancied themselves gamesters of a high order. But there was only one minor-league thief (he hid cards) among them, a few anal retentives who nurtured their secret straights with confessional glee, and an assortment of barflies whose beer intake spurred them to ever greater mismanagement of their hands.

I was light-years beyond them all in handling both the deck and myself, for I had learned from Manfredo that a magician is also an actor; and so I considered my financial gain from those ink-stained wretches to be fair exchange for a thespian’s risky performance. Some nights I chose to lose heavily at the outset, though good luck would usually stalk my later play. On occasions I might even drop thirty dollars on the night to prove my vulnerability, but by so doing was then free at the next sitting to fleece again those good- and well-tempered suckers. Thus did I move ever closer to my degree in education.

I interrupted my college career to enlist in the army in 1942, when I turned eighteen, gained a lieutenancy, and in ’44 I landed at Normandy with replacement troops after the heroes and martyrs had taken the high ground as well as the beach. I was seldom in danger from then on but could not let go of the universal fantasy that death was a land mine ten steps ahead. I walked the wrong way to die, it turned out, and after the war I went back to Albany to finish my degree in three years instead of four. After graduation, instead of teaching, I found a job with the Manhattan publishing house where my father had worked as an illustrator.

Idiotically, I’d stayed in the reserve after the war, so when Korea erupted I turned into a retread. We started at Fort Benning, creating an infantry division from scratch. The Captain who had been assigned to establish the Public Information Office, the division’s press section, liked my record: precocious scholar, sometime newsman, editor of books, working on a book of my own, and, on top of it all, a line officer in the big war. What can I say?

We went to Germany instead of Korea, the first troops to go back to Europe since the war, and we headquartered in the Drake Kaserne, a comfortable old Nazi Wehrmacht barracks outside Frankfurt, which brings me to Giselle, my somewhat excruciating wife, and the cause of my using my talent with cards for the second time in my life to enhance my net worth.

The enlisted men of our PIO section were throwing a Christmas party that year (it was 1951) and invited the Captain and me to stop by for a bit of wassail. I was already there when the Captain arrived with this remarkable beauty on his arm. They’d have a drink, then go to dinner; that was their plan. The men had hired a belly dancer named Eva to elevate the lust factor at the party and she was dancing when the Captain and Giselle arrived. The troops were yelling at Eva to remove garments, but she wouldn’t even lower a strap. She did a few extra bumps, but that didn’t cut the mustard with the boys, and half a dozen of them backed her into a corner. Because of who knows what reason, Giselle spoke up.

“Leave her alone,” she said. “I’ll take over.”

The Captain looked stricken as Giselle picked up a high stool from a corner and carried it to the center of the room. All eyes went to her as she sat on the stool with her hands in her lap, evaluating her audience. Then she undid the two top burtons of her blouse, revealing a contour — the quartering of a small moon. She lifted one leg, pointed her toe, her instep arched inside her elegant black pump, the heel of her other shoe hooked over the stool’s bottom rung. One up, one down. The upward motion of her right leg moved her skirt a bit above the knee. She swept the room with her eyes, engaging everyone like a seductive angel: madonna of the high perch.

The swine who had been attacking Eva suddenly realized that Giselle’s panorama seemed to be accessible. They didn’t even notice Eva backing off to a corner, snatching up her coat, and running out the door.

The swine grunted when Giselle brought her right leg back and hooked her shoe on the highest rung, her skirt going higher still. Oh how they grunted, those swine. They were all in uniform, their Ike jackets swinging loose. They jostled each other to solidify their positions. They knew, as others jostled them, that their turf nearest Giselle had become valuable. They could have rented it out.

One of them leaped into a crouch, inches away from Giselle’s knee, and he stared up the central boulevard of her shadow. But no one dared to touch her, for they intuited that vantage was all they would ever get, and the jostling grew stronger.

They moved in an ellipse, the ones with a clear view of the boulevard being the first to be shoved out of the vista.

Shoved out of the vista, imagine it.

Poor swine.

But they ran around the ellipse, got back into line, and shoved on. “Keep it moving” was the unspoken motto, and on they shoved, those in the best position always trying to retain the turf. But they’d lose it to the needy, then circle back again.

Giselle started to sing, in French, “Quand Madelon.”

“Et chacun lui raconte une histoire, une histoire à sa façon. .” she sang.

Then she moved her blouse to the right and exposed more of that region. My impulse was to photograph her from a low angle, but when I told her this later she said she’d have considered it rape. She touched her breast lightly and I thought, “Phantom queen as art object.”

“La Madelon,” Giselle sang, “pour nous n’est pas sévère.”

The swine kept moving round and round, like the old ploy of running from one end of the photo to the other in the days when the camera panned so slowly you could put yourself into the photo twice. I see those piggies still, moving in their everlasting ellipse — that piggy-go-round — shouldering one another, hunkering down as they moved to their left for a better view of that boulevard, lowering themselves, debasing all romance, groveling to Giselle’s secrets with bend of knee and squint of eye.

I still can’t blame them.

And what did the swine see? Quite amazing to talk about it afterward. One saw wildflowers — black-eyed Susans. Another said she wore a garment. Yet another no. A sergeant who’d been in the Fourth Armored during the war said he saw a landscape strewn with crosses and corpses, the reason why the war was fought.

And then she gave one final rising of the knee, stood up, and put herself back together. Slowly the troops started to applaud, and it grew and grew.

“More, more,” they called out, but Giselle only buttoned the last button, threw them a kiss, and returned to the Captain’s side. The troops shook the Captain’s hand, congratulated him on his taste in women, and when he went for their coats I asked Giselle her name but she wouldn’t tell me. Then the Captain came and said, “All right, Giselle, let’s go.”

“Ah, Giselle,” I said.

It took me only a few days to track her to the office where she worked as a translator for diplomats and army bureaucrats.

“I’ve come to rescue you from old men,” I told her.

“I knew you would,” she said with a foxy smile.

But she resisted me, and professed fidelity to the Captain, who, though twice-and-a-half her age and going to fat, was flush with money from his black-market adventures in coffee and cigarettes.

“Can you take me to Paris for the weekend as he does?” she asked me. “Can you fly me to the Riviera?”

“How direct the mercenary heart,” I said. “I understand your point. I suspect we are much alike.”

But the truth was that I never valued money except when I had none. And Giselle’s hedonist remarks were a façade to keep me at bay. You see she was already starting to love me.

Each day I sent her a yellow rose — yellow the color of age, cowardice, jaundice, jealousy, gold, and her own radiant hair. In a week the flowers softened her telephone voice, in two weeks she agreed to dinner, and in three to a Heidelberg weekend, which was the first stop on my road to dementia.

We stayed at a small pension and left it only for meals. Otherwise we inhabited the bed. She put all of her intimate arenas on display and let me do with them what I pleased, with a single exception: I could enter none of them with my principal entering device.

I had never been more excited by a woman’s body, though I know the relative fraudulence of memory in such matters. Denial of entry was of small consequence to a man of my imagination, given the beatific pot of flesh to which I had access in every other way. Giselle said she was fearful of pregnancy, of disease, of sin, even of vice, can you imagine? But I know she was actually testing my capacity to tolerate her tantalizing. I’ve known exhibitionistic women, several, but none with the raw, artistic talent for exposure that Giselle demonstrated in Heidelberg. This was my initiation into the heavenly tortures of Giselle-love.

In the days that followed, she and I moved together in a delirium, I sick with love. When I was away from her I fell into what I came to think of as the coma of the quotidian, my imagination dead to everything except the vision of her face, her yellow hair, and the beige, angelical beauty of her sex, though that describes only the look of it, not the non-angelical uses to which she put it.

One understands addiction, obsession. It begins as the lunacy of whim, or desire, but ends as the madness of need, or essence. I could not be without her, and so all my waking movements were the orchestration of our next meeting.

I bought her gifts: Hummel dolls, a cuckoo clock, a Chanel suit, Italian shoes, cultured pearls (I could not afford diamonds). I bought her books. She’d never heard of Kafka, or Christopher Marlowe, or Philip Marlowe, for she was a visual animal, fascinated by art and photography, the twin provinces of her mother, who ran an art gallery in Paris.

I bought her a camera, took her to Versailles, Mont St. Michel, and other spectacles for the eye, took her to Omaha Beach and tried to explain to her some of the war and my puny part in it. She’d lived in Paris the entire war and saw no fighting, only occupation, during which her father had been executed by the Nazis. Her mother, a paragon of independence and survival, raised this very willful daughter.

There was much more, but, to get to the point, Giselle-love broke me. I ran through my paychecks and small savings account, and got a bit of money from my mother. But I soon went through it all, and it was out of the question to ask Peter for money. He never had any.

Then I remembered Walt Popp, captain of Special Services, mentioning a game of poker. That was a month after I met Giselle, the days when I had no time for any other game but her. Now I tracked down Popp at the officers’ club and bought him a drink.

“I thought you were getting a poker game together,” I said.

“I did ask a few guys. Are you ready?”

“I could use a little action.”

“I thought you had this beauty, this cover-girl type.”

“Hanging out with you mugs, I’ll appreciate her even more.”

“I’ll round up a crowd for Friday night,” Popp said.

So I practiced. There’d never been a time I hadn’t, really. Manfredo’s wisdom was that once you lose your touch it will never come back with quite the same delicacy. Any talent must be husbanded or else we diminish in the breach; and so I spent two hours a week, maybe three, handling the cards, cutting them for aces, dealing seconds, bottoms, reading the deck when I shuffled. I practiced in bed, in the latrine, anytime I was alone. Almost nobody after Fobie’s knew about me and cards. My magic was still in my hat.

Popp told the Captain there’d be a game and I’d be playing, and the Captain brought it up the next day in the office.

“Cards? You mean you aren’t seeing Giselle anymore?”

“Matter of fact I am,” I said.

“I don’t see her anymore.”

“Is that so?”

“You damn well know it’s so.”

“I don’t follow you around, Captain.”

“You follow Giselle around.”

“I wouldn’t deny it.”

“She likes ’em young.”

“She’s young.” She was twenty.

“I miss her,” he said.

“I’d miss her too.”

“You took her away from me.”

“That’s not how it happens. People do what they want.”

“She liked me.”

“We all like you, Captain.”

“You do good work, Orson. It’s a good thing you do good work.”

“I try not to disappoint.”

“That’s smart. Never disappoint. What time is the game?”

“Seven o’clock.”

“I’ll see you across the table,” he said.

It sounded like an invitation to a duel.

“Is the coffee ready, Orson?” my father called.

“It is,” I said. “Come on down.”

I heard him shuffling toward the stairs in his slippers, and I remembered when as a child I shat in one of his slippers, a moment of my precocious psychosis. It is a thief’s traditional trick to shit in the victim’s lair, and I had been a thief of vision — of my father’s and mother’s private life. The occasion was an argument over love. Whose property was Claire Purcell? Was she owned body and soul by Peter, her live-in lover, or was she the intimate assistant to Manfredo the Magnificent?

I awoke in the middle of the night to find my father home after a two-week absence, heard his voice, moved toward it comprehending no words, closed on the parental bedroom to see my naked father standing over my supine, naked mother, and hear him say: “Why don’t you take your cunt back to Manfredo and have him give you another one?”

I, at the age of eight, had never heard the word “cunt” uttered other than once in schoolboy talk: Why do they call it a cunt?. . You ever see one?. . Yeah. . Well, then, what else would you call it? Nor did I understand the import of the phrase “another one,” until time had passed and I had dwelled sufficiently on the overheard words to conclude that my father had been talking about me, the only one there was: Orson Purcell, son without siblings (living or dead) of Claire Purcell-never-Phelan. I was “son,” “sonny,” “Orse,” and “Orsy-Horsey” to Peter Phelan, the only father I’d ever known. But when I at last understood the meaning of his assault on my mother (I soon began to use the term “father” in an ambiguous way, and eventually abandoned it), then it occurred to me that bastardy might be an enduring theme of my life. I grew angry at Peter for not (if not) being my father, grew angry also at Manfredo, who was unacceptable as a father.

This latter anger prevailed after I entered a dressing room of the Palace Theater in Albany, just after Manfredo had finished his act on stage. There sat Mother on the dressing-room vanity, naked legs akimbo. There stood Manfredo in top hat, tux jacket, and pants around ankles, thrusting his magic wand into her rabbit, and giving moon to all visitors who did not know they were not wanted, just as the magic couple did not realize that they had not locked the door until after the Orse was gone.

Orson the adventurer, Orson the thief of vision. I waited a week before making the assault on my father’s slipper (I should have shat in Manfredo’s hat) as an ultimate gesture of rebellion against his verbal cruelty. My mother rejected my act of solidarity with her, terming it loathsome, and my father, whose anger with Claire had abated, took off his belt and said, “Now I’m going to whip you until you bleed,” and did. I then brooded myself into a dream of being attacked by crocodiles and, while pulling myself out of the water, of being consumed by the crocs up to the neck, my head floating away to live a disembodied life of its own.

That, more or less, is the truth of my head.

Peter finally reached the bottom of the stairs and shuffled toward the dining room.

“I never thought my bones would turn into my enemy,” he said with a great wheezing sound. “Skeletons are not to be trusted.”

He sat at the dining-room table and I put the toast and butter on the table and poured his and my coffee.

“Are you going to go to work?” I asked him.

“I have no alternative.”

“You could take it easy. Take the day off. It’s a special day, isn’t it?”

“That’s like cheating at solitaire. Who gets cheated?”

“Are you nearing the end of this painting?”

“There’s distance to go, but there’s even more to do after this one.”

“You always talk about dying but you don’t behave like a dying man.”

“As soon as you behave like a dying man, you’re dead.”

“You’re a man with a mission.”

“A man with curiosity. I come from a long line of failed and sinful flesh, and there’s a darkness in it I want to see.”

“Speaking of sin,” I said, “isn’t today the day that Adelaide comes to give you your therapy?”

“You have an abrasive tongue in your head this morning.”

“I just want to make sure I’m here to let her in.”

“You’re a thoughtful boy, Orson.”

“I used to be a boy,” I said.

We looked at the window at the beginning of the day, a grudging gray light, no sunbeam to color it brilliant.

“They say it’s going to rain,” I said.

“They always say that,” said Peter. “And they’re always right.”

Two

Those who do the great heroic work of being human never work solely from experience. My father, for instance, could never have painted his Malachi Suite, that remarkable body of paintings and sketches that made him famous, without having projected himself into the lives of the people who had lived and died so absurdly, so tragically, in the days before and after his own birth. I am not implying here that any historical reconstruction is heroic, but rather that imaginative work of the first rank must come about through its creator’s subordination of the self, and also from the absorption into that self of what has gone on beyond or before its own existence.

Clearly there is no way to absorb the history of even one other being wholly into oneself; but the continuity of the spirit relies on an imagination like my father’s, which makes the long-dead world, with a fine suddenness, as Keats put it, fly back to us with its joys and its terrors and its wisdom. Keats invented the term “negative capability” to define what he saw in the true poetical character: a quality of being that “has no self — it is everything and nothing. . it enjoys light and shade; it lives in gusto, be it foul or fair, high or low. .” The poet should be able to throw his soul into any person, or object, that he confronts, and then speak out of that person, or object. “When I am in a room with people,” wrote Keats, “if I ever am free from speculating on creations of my own brain. . the identity of every one in the room begins to press upon me [so] that I am in a very little time annihilated. .”

I speak with some authority when I say that it is a major struggle for anyone to annihilate his or her own ego, to cure the disease of self-contemplation, for as you will see there is ample attention paid to myself in this memoir. But I believe it could not be otherwise, for only through what I was, and became, could the family be made visible, to me, to anyone. And so I invoke Keats, without any claim to art of my own, both to drain myself of myself, and to project myself into realms of the family where I have no credentials for being, but am there even so; for I do know the people in this memoir, know where and how they lived, or live still.

I know, for instance, what is going on in the Quinn house on North Pearl Street in North Albany this morning at a little past five o’clock. Two sleeping men are nearly naked, and three sleeping women are ritually modest in their shorty summer nightgowns. In each of three bedrooms a crucifix hangs on a nail over the sleepers’ beds and, in a luminous print looking down at Peg and George Quinn in their double bed, the Christ exposes his sacred heart, that heart encircled by tongues of fire.

The house normally rouses itself from slumber at seven o’clock, except on Sunday, when late rising is the rule. As the milkman sets foot on the front stoop next door at this crepuscular hour, that house’s resident chow disturbs all light sleepers here with his murderous bark from the back yard. Under the quietest of circumstances it is not easy to achieve sleep on this infernal morning, but after the chow’s bark, George Quinn, vigorous still at seventy-one, raises himself on one elbow, rolls himself onto his wife’s body, and then, with high comfort and the expertise that comes with practiced affection, he rides the lovely beast of love.

Dead heat was saturating the room, the sheet and pillowcases under the two bodies soaked from the long and humid night, no breeze at all coming in the fully opened window, no leaf moving on the trees of North Pearl Street; nor was any cross-ventilation possible, for the bedroom door was closed now in these moments of hot waking love, all nightclothes strewn on the floor beside the bed, the top sheet kicked away.

As they moved in their naked heat toward mutual climax the door creaked open, its faint crack a thunderclap to both lovers. George knelt abruptly up from his wife’s soft and sodden body, grabbed for his pajama bottoms as Peg felt for the lost topsheet to cover herself; and the door creaked again, the gap between its edge and its jamb widening, the hall light striping the room with a sliver of brilliance, then a board’s width; and there, in the foot-wide opening, appeared Annie Phelan’s face, ghostly inquisitor with flowing white hair, her face growing larger and more visible as she pushed the door open and stared into the bedroom of interrupted love.

“What is it, Mama?” Peg asked.

Behind the door George was stepping into his pajamas, and Peg, with the use of one deft arm, the other holding the found sheet in front of her breasts, was threading herself into her nightgown.

“What time is it, Margaret?” Annie asked.

“It’s too early,” said Peg. “Go back to bed.”

“We have to make the coffee and set the table.”

“Later, Mama. It isn’t even five-thirty yet. Nobody’s up except you.”

From his darkened bedroom Billy Phelan inquired: “Is Ma all right?”

“She’s all right,” Peg said. “She’s just off schedule again.”

Billy raised his head, flipped his pillow to put the wet side down, and tried to go back to sleep, thinking of how he used to work the window in Morty Pappas’s horseroom, but no more.

Standing in the doorway of the third bedroom, where she and Annie Phelan slept in twin beds, Agnes Dempsey, wearing a pink knee-length nightgown, and yawning and scratching her head with both hands, said to Peg, “I didn’t hear her get up, she doesn’t have her slippers on”; and then to Annie Phelan: “What kind of an Irishman are you that you don’t put your slippers on when you walk around the house?”

“Oh you shut up,” Annie said.

“Go in and get your slippers if you want to walk around.”

Annie went into the bedroom. “The bitch,” she muttered. “The bitch.”

“I heard you,” Agnes said.

“You did not,” said Annie.

“I could stay up and make the coffee,” Agnes said.

“No, it’s too early,” said Peg. “She’d stay up too, and then we’d never get her back on schedule.”

“You go to bed,” said Agnes. “I’ll keep her in the room. I’ll put the chair in front of the door.”

George was already back in bed, eyes closed and trying for sleep as Peg lay on her back beside him and hoisted her nightgown to thigh level to let her legs breathe. Her interrupted climax would probably nag her at odd moments for the rest of the day, but she wouldn’t dispel that now with her own touch. She wondered when the day of no more climaxes would arrive, wondered whether it would be her failure or George’s. How long before George was as senile as Mama? When was Mama’s last orgasm? When did she last feel Poppy’s hand on her? Peg had no memory of anything sexual in Annie’s life, never caught them at it the way Danny caught her and George up at the lake. We thought he was swimming for the afternoon, but in he came, George doing great, and me on the verge. He opens the door with the key and we both look at him. “I didn’t know you were sleeping,” he says, and out he goes, and that’s that for that.

Peg charted the day to come: office till noon, the boss, and Basil, probably. Work will be light, all their attention on the strike vote in the shop this morning. I hope there’s no fights. Then Roger. He wants to drive me down to Peter’s luncheon. It’d be easy to go along with Roger. He has a way about him, and funny too. Smart and funny and so young. It’s so silly. The important thing is to turn George around.

“Are you asleep, George?”

“Nobody can sleep in this stuff. It’s like sleeping in pea soup.”

“We have to buy this house.”

“We do like hell.”

“Think about it, damn it all, think about it! Where could we ever again find this much space for that kind of money?”

“Who needs all this space? Danny’s not home anymore.”

“He comes home sometimes. And we still have Mama.”

“Yeah, and we also got Agnes. Jesus Christ.”

“She’s a big help.”

“She’s also another mouth.”

“If she wasn’t here we’d have to pay somebody to watch Mama, unless you want to stay home and do it.”

“Why can’t Billy take care of his own mother?”

“Billy can’t do that sort of thing. And he wouldn’t. The personal things, I mean.”

“You always got an answer,” George said.

“So do you. And the answer’s always no.”

Peg pushed herself up from the bed, pulled off her nightgown, thrust herself into a cotton robe, and strode briskly to the bathroom, leaving the bedroom door ajar. The hall light would fall directly into George’s eyes. Good. George stood up, walked to the door and closed it, sat back on the bed, and looked at his dim reflection in the dresser mirror.

“You’re gonna die in the poorhouse of bullshit and other people’s generosity,” he said to himself.

In her chair by the parlor window Annie Phelan monitored the passing of neighbors, sipping her first cup of tea of the day from the wheeled serving table, popping white grapes into her mouth, chewing them with great vigor, coming to an end of chewing, organizing her lips and tongue, and then spitting the grape seeds onto the oriental rug.

Billy, in the kitchen breakfast nook, was reading the baseball results (the Red Sox and the Albany Senators had both lost) in the morning Times-Union, his right leg stretched kitchenward, its plaster ankle cast covered by the leg of his navy-blue Palm Beach trousers, the toes of his shoeless foot covered by half a white sock, his hickory cane standing in the corner of the nook next to a paper bag containing his right shoe.

Agnes Dempsey, practical nurse and Billy’s special friend, who’d been a now-and-then overnight guest for years, and who became a full-time live-in member of the household a year ago April, when Annie’s feebleness and vagueness were becoming a family problem, Agnes Dempsey at forty stood at the counter by the sink, breaking soft-boiled eggs into coffee cups with broken handles.

Peg, dressed perfectly, as usual, in high heels and blue flowered dress, stood at the gas stove pouring a cup of coffee, the only breakfast she would allow herself, except for one bite of Billy’s toast, she in such a high-energized condition that we must intuit some private frenzy in her yet to be revealed.

Agnes brought Annie her breakfast before serving anyone else, stirred up the eggs with a teaspoon, topped them off with a touch of butter, salt, and pepper, then set them in front of Annie along with two pieces of toast. Annie looked at the eggs.

“They got bugs,” she said.

“What’s got bugs?”

“Those things. Get the bugs off.”

“That’s not bugs, Annie. That’s pepper.”

Annie tried to shove the pepper to one side with a spoon.

“I don’t eat bugs,” she said.

“That’s a new one,” Agnes said when she set Billy’s eggs in front of him on the oilcloth-covered table. “She thinks pepper is bugs.”

“Then don’t give her any pepper,” Billy said.

“Well, naturally,” said Agnes, and Peg saw a pout in Agnes’s lips and knew it had more than pepper in it. They all ate in silence until Agnes said, “I’ve got to get a room someplace.”

“You don’t have to go noplace,” Billy said.

“Well, I do, and you know I do.”

“Let’s not create a crisis,” Peg said.

“I’m not creating a crisis,” Agnes said. “I’m saying I’ve got to get out of here. Father McDevitt said it, not me. But I’ve been thinking the same thing.”

“Then why didn’t you ever say anything?” said Billy.

“Because I didn’t know how to say it.”

“Well, you’ve said it now,” said Peg. “Do you mean it, or is this just a little low-level blackmail?”

“What’s that mean, blackmail?”

“Agnes,” said Peg, “go on with your tale of woe.”

“I’m saying only what the Father said. That we can’t go on living this way, because it doesn’t look moral.”

“Very little in this life looks moral to me,” Peg said. “When are you leaving?”

“She’s not leaving,” Billy said. “Who’ll take care of Ma?”

“We can’t let Ma interfere with Agnes’s new moral look,” Peg said.

“You heard the Father,” Agnes said. “ ‘How long have you been here, my dear?’ A little over a year, Father.’ I felt like I was in confession. ‘You did that? How many times did you do it, dear?’ They always want the arithmetic.”

“I’m surprised the Vatican hasn’t sent in a team of investigators to get to the bottom of this,” Peg said.

“Whataya talkin’ about, this?” Billy said. “There’s nothin’ goin’ on.”

“Then you don’t have anything to worry about,” said Peg.

“Worry? Why should I worry?”

“You shouldn’t,” Peg said. “You’re clean.”

“Look, I know what you’re gertin’ at,” Billy said, “and I’m not gertin’ married, so change the subject.”

“Changed. When do you move out, Ag?”

“ ‘We don’t want to give scandal,’ the priest says. What does he think we do here?”

“He imagines what you do,” said Peg. “It probably keeps him peppy. What else did he say?”

“He says we have to create the sacrament.”

“What sacrament?” Billy said.

“I don’t think he meant baptism,” said Peg. “Do you?”

“I don’t know what he means sacrament,” Billy insisted.

“No more profane love in the afternoon, maybe? Make it sacred?”

“You’d better watch what you say,” Agnes said.

“You better organize this act you’ve got going here,” Peg said. “And you too,” she said to Billy “I really don’t give a rap what the priest says, or the bishop either. This is our house and we do what we like in it. But I think you ought to make a decision about your own lives for a change. I’ve got to get to work.” She bolted her coffee and stood up.

“I’ll call about supper,” she told Agnes. “I’ve got that luncheon with Peter and Orson. The lawyer’s picking me up and I suppose the whole gang will be there. I want to go down early and help with the lunch.”

“We’ve got a roasting chicken and lamb chops,” Agnes said.

“Better be careful about lamb chops,” George Quinn said, coming through the swinging door into the kitchen. “That’s why Annie had her stroke. Always showin’ off eatin’ lamb-chop fat.”

“I’m going where there’s no lamb chops,” Peg said. She gave George a quick kiss and went out.

The phone rang and George, the closest to it, answered: “Hello there, who’s calling this early?. . Who?. . Oh, yeah. . Well, no, Peg’s gone to work. Any message?. . Yeah, Billy’s right here,” and he handed Billy the phone with the words, “It’s Orson, that floo-doo.”

“What’s the prospect, Orson?” Billy said into the phone.

“I need to get out of this goddamn house,” I said. “What are you up to?”

“I gotta go to the doctor’s.”

“When?”

“This morning.”

“I’ll take you,” I said.

“What’s your problem down there?” Billy asked.

“It’s a big day today. I need to get out from under for a while.”

“So come have breakfast and we’ll go down to Sport Schindler’s for an eye-opener. I gotta meet a guy there owes me money.”

“Always a pleasant prospect,” I said. “I’ll see you in five minutes.”

“You can’t get here sooner?”

George Quinn sprinkled a teaspoon of sugar on his eggs, his tie tied tight on his lightly starched collar on this day that was headed into the high nineties: sartorial propriety, impervious to weather.

“So how’s the numbers business, George?” I asked as I sat across the breakfast table from him and Billy.

“It don’t exist,” George said.

“What?”

“Where you been, Orson?” Billy said. “George has been out of business for a year.”

“I thought that was temporary,” I said.

“A few of the big boys went to work by phone after it all closed down. But not me,” George said.

“I blame Dewey for starting it,” Billy said. “That son of a bitch, what the hell’s the town gonna do without numbers? Without Broadway.”

“Broadway? Broadway’s not gone.”

“It ain’t gone,” Billy said, “but it ain’t got no life to it. You can’t get arrested on Broadway anymore. Town is tough as Clancy’s nuts. Even if you get a bet down you don’t know the payoff. No phone line with the information anymore. You gotta wait for tomorrow’s newspaper. I blame Kefauver.”

“Forget I asked,” I said. “Tell me about the house, George. Peg says you may buy this place after all these years.”

“Peg said that?”

“She said you might cash an insurance policy. Seven grand for this house sounds like the bargain of the century.”

“Not buyin’,” George said.

“It’s fifteen hundred down,” Billy said.

“Fifteen hundred down the bowl,” George said. “Who’s got money to buy houses when you’re seventy-one years old? I’m not waitin’ for my ship to come in. It’s not comin’ and I know it.”

“What’re you gonna do, move?” I asked.

“Yeah. We’ll find a place.”

“Probably not at this rent,” Billy said.

“Then we’ll pay what it takes,” George said.

“Why not put that into owning the house?” I said. “It’d make more sense.”

“I’m not buyin’ a house!” George yelled, standing up from the table. “Has everybody got that? No house. Period.”

“You ready to go, Orson?” Billy asked softly, reaching for his cane.

“I guess I’m ready. I haven’t had any coffee but I guess I’m ready.”

“Let him have his coffee,” Agnes said.

“I don’t know if I’ll make it for dinner,” George said to Agnes. “Depends on when the picnic ends.”

“Picnic? I thought it was a political meeting,” Agnes said.

“It’s a political picnic.”

“What’s not political in this town?” Billy said.

“Buyin’ a house,” George said.

Agnes collected Annie’s breakfast dishes and her untouched eggs and put them on the counter by the sink, gave Peg’s African violets by the windowsill of the nook their weekly watering, then sat across from me to finish her second cup of coffee. As she sat, Billy rose up on his cane.

“I gotta do a wee-wee before we leave,” he said.

“Good,” I said. “Time to worry is when you can’t.”

“Stop that talk,” Agnes said.

I stared at her and decided she was a looker. Lucky Billy. Agnes had bottled blond hair, the color of which she changed whimsically, or maybe it was seasonally. She’d put on a few pounds since I’d last seen her, but she could handle them. She looked crisp and fresh in a red-and-white-check house dress with a box neck and two-inch straps over bare shoulders.

“I couldn’t butt in on that conversation about the house,” Agnes said, “but I’d be glad to give a hand with the down payment. I’ve got some dollars tucked away.”

“That’s real nice, Agnes,” I said. “Did you tell Peg?”

“Nobody yet. I’m just sayin’ it now ’cause it occurred to me. But if Billy hears he’ll think I’m proposin’.”

“Have you done that before?”

“Twenty times, how about. But he can’t see himself married. He’s been single too long.”

“Everybody’s single till they marry.”

“Billy’d be single even after he got married, if he ever got married, which I don’t think.”

“He loves you, though,” I said. “Anybody can see that.”

“Sure. But what’s he done for me lately?”

“Maybe you ought to go out together more often, be alone. I know you’re in a lot with the family, taking care of Annie.”

“We go to the movies once a week, and dinner after. But you’re right. We should. I also got another obligation, a patient. An old man I sit with one night a week. And another night I take piano.”

“How long you been taking?”

“Twenty-four years.”

“You must be good.”

“I’m terrible. Maybe I’ll be good some day, but I don’t practice enough.”

“It’s hard without a piano.”

“Yeah. But I get a thrill playing the teacher’s. I always do a half-hour alone, before and after the lesson. And once or twice a week I play in the church basement in the afternoons. It fills me up, excites me. You know how it is when you feel young and you know you still got a lot to learn, and it’s gonna be good?”

“You’re a graceful person, Agnes.”

“Yeah, well, George shouldn’t be afraid of lettin’ people do him a favor. That down payment’s not a whole lot of money, really. But I heard him tell Peg, ‘They don’t give loans to people like me.’ “

“What’s he mean, ‘people like me’?”

“He doesn’t know about credit,” Agnes said. “He’s got no credit anyplace. He paid cash all his life, even for cars. Doesn’t wanna owe anybody a nickel. He thinks credit’s bad news.”

“So’s not having a place to live.”

“He said he’d live in a ditch before he bought a house.”

“He’s batty.”

“Could be: Wouldn’t be a first in this family.” She looked up at me. “I didn’t mean that personally,” she said.

Billy expected to have his cast removed but that didn’t happen. After Doc McDonald read the X-rays he decided the cast should stay in place another three weeks at least, and so Billy had to carry his right shoe around in a paper bag the rest of the day. We were in my car, Danny Quinn’s old 1952 Chev that I’d bought from Peg. Billy mentioned an eye-opener at Sport Schindler’s, but it was only ten-fifteen, and that’s a little early for my eye.

“You been to the filtration plant since they started that dig?” I asked Billy.

“I ain’t been there in years. My grandfather used to run that joint.”

“I know, and Tommy was the sweeper. You see in the paper about the bones they found?”

“Yeah, you think they’re still there?”

“It’s worth a look.”

The old plant, which had changed the health of Albany in 1899, was being torn down. The chronic “Albany sore throat” of the nineteenth century had been attributed to inadequate filtering of Hudson River water. But after the North Albany plant opened, the sore throats faded. Still, river water was a periodic liability until the late 1920s, when the politicians dammed up two creeks in the Helderberg Mountains and solved all city water troubles forever. The filtration plant relaxed into a standby item, then a useless relic. Now it stood in the way of a superhighway’s course and so it was time to knock it down.

Construction workers had found bones in their dig, near the mouth of the Staatskill, the creek that ran eastward from Albany’s western plateau and had long ago been buried in a pipe under North Pearl Street and Broadway. When the dig reached the glacial ledge where the creek made its last leap into the Hudson River, half a dozen huge bones were found. Workers didn’t inform the public until they also found two tusks, after which a geologist and biologist were summoned. No conclusions had been reported in the morning paper but everybody in town was saying elephants.

I drove down the hill from the doctor’s office and into North Albany. When I reached Pearl Street Billy said, “Go down Main Street. I want to see what it looks like.”

Billy’s grandfather Joe Farrell (they called him Iron Joe because two men broke their knuckles on his jaw) had lived at the bottom of Main Street, and also had run a saloon, The Wheelbarrow, next to his home. The house was gone but the saloon building still stood, a sign on it noting the headquarters of a truckers’ union. Trucking companies had replaced the lumber yards as the commerce along Erie Boulevard, the filled-in bed of the old canal.

“I wouldn’t know the place,” Billy said. “I never get down here anymore.” He’d been born and raised on Main Street.

“Lot of memories here for you,” I said.

“I knew how many trees grew in those lots over there. I knew how many steps it took to get from Broadway to the bottom of the hill. The lock house on the canal was right there.” And he pointed toward open space. “Iron Joe carried me on his shoulder over the bridge to the other side of the lock.”

Implicit but unspoken in Billy’s memory was that this was the street his father fled after dropping his infant son and causing his death. I was close to Billy, but I’d never heard him mention that. He and I are first cousins, sons of most peculiar brothers, I the unacknowledged bastard of Peter Phelan, Billy the abandoned son of Francis Phelan, both fathers flawed to the soul, both in their errant ways worth as much as most martyrs.

Billy was still looking at where his house had been when I turned onto the road that led to the filtration plant. It was busy with heavy equipment for the dig; also a police car was parked crossways in the road. A policeman got out of the car and raised his hand to stop us. Billy knew him, Doggie Murphy.

“Hey, Dog,” Billy said. “We came to see the elephants.”

“Can’t go through, Billy.”

“What’s goin’ on?”

“They found bones.”

“I know they found bones. I read the paper.”

“No, other bones. Human bones.”

“Oh yeah?”

“So nobody comes or goes till the coroner gets here.”

“Whose bones are they?”

“Somebody who don’t need ’em anymore,” Doggie said.

And so I swung the car around and headed for Sport Schindler’s, where I would have my eye opened whether it needed it or not. Sport was pushing sixty, a retired boxer who had run this saloon for thirty-five years, keeping a continuity that dated to the last century. The place had a pressed-tin ceiling, a long mahogany bar with brass rail, shuffleboard, dart board, and years of venerable grime on the walls. Apart from the grime it was also unusually clean for a saloon, and a haven for the aging population of Broadway. A poster at one end of the bar showed two sixtyish, wrinkled, white-haired naked women, both seated with hands covering their laps, both wearing glasses, both with an enduring shapeliness and a splendid lack of sag. Centered over the back bar was the mounted head of a cow, shot in Lamb’s lot by Winker Wilson, who thought it was a rabbit.

Billy had lived for years in the night world of Broadway, where Schindler’s was a historic monument. But times were changing now with the press of urban renewal by squares and straights who had no use at all for Billy’s vanishing turf. Also, the open horserooms of Albany had moved underground when the racing-information phone line was shut off by pressure from the Governor, and the only action available now was by personal phone call or handbook. Bookies, to avoid being past-posted, paid off only on the race results in tomorrow’s newspaper. What the hell kind of a town is it when a man can’t walk in off the street and bet a horse?

Sport Schindler’s looked like an orthopedic ward when we settled in. Billy sat at the end of the bar, his right foot in his plaster cast partially covered by white sock and trouser cuff, his hickory cane dangling from the edge of the bar. Up the bar was a man whose complete right leg was in a cast elevated on another stool, a pair of crutches leaning against the bar beside him.

Billy earned his cast riding in a car whose windshield somebody hit with a rock, scaring hell out of the driver, who drove into a tree. Billy broke his ankle putting on the brakes in the back seat. “You ain’t safe noplace in this world,” Billy concluded.

The man with the crutches was Morty Pappas, a Greek bookie who had been a casualty of the state-police crackdown on horserooms. Instead of booking on the sneak, Morty took his bankroll and flew to Reno with a stripper named Lulu, a dangerous decision, for Lulu was the most favored body of Buffalo Johnny Rizzo, the man who ran the only nightclub strip show in town. Morty came back to Albany six months after he left, flush with money from a streak of luck at the gaming tables, but minus Lulu and her body. Rizzo welcomed Morty back by shooting him in the leg, a bum shot, since he was aiming at Morty’s crotch. Rizzo went to jail without bail, the shooting being his third felony charge in four years. But it had come out in the morning paper that by court order he was permitted bail; and so Buffalo Johnny was back in circulation.

Billy was offering Morty even money that the bones found up at the filtration plant were not elephant bones, Billy’s argument based in his expressed belief that they never let elephants hang around Albany.

“Whataya mean they never let ’em hang around,” Morty said. “Who’s gonna tell an elephant he can’t hang around?”

“You want the bet or don’t you?” Billy asked.

“They found tusks with the bones.”

“That don’t mean nothin’,” Billy said.

“Who else got tusks outside of elephants?”

“Joey Doyle and his sister.”

“You’re so sure gimme two to one,” said Morty.

“Six to five is all I go.”

“You’re right and the newspaper’s wrong, is that it?”

“What I’m sayin’ is six to five.”

“You got a bet,” said Morty, and Billy looked at me and winked.

I couldn’t figure out why Billy was so hot to bet against elephants, but neither could I bet against Billy, for I was his kinsman in more ways than one. Someone once remarked that Billy had lived a wastrel’s useless life, which struck me as a point of view benightedly shrouded in uplift. I always found this world of Broadway to be the playground of that part of the soul that is impervious to any form of improvement not associated with chance, and relentlessly hostile to any conventional goad toward success and heaven. I remember years ago standing with Billy and Sport Schindler as a Fourth of July parade went past Sport’s place on Broadway. A stranger beside us, seeing a Boy Scout troop stepping along, remarked, “What a fine bunch of boys.” Sport took his cigar out of his mouth to offer his counterpoint: “Another generation of stool pigeons,” he said.

That was years ago, and now here I was again with Sport and Billy and their friends, and those Scouts had grown up to become the lawyers, bankers, and politicians who had forced Sport to sell his saloon so they could level the block and transform it into somebody else’s money. The Monte Carlo gaming rooms were gone, another victim of the crackdown: end of the wheel-and-birdcage era on Broadway; Louie’s pool room was empty, only Louie’s name left on the grimy windows; Red the barber had moved uptown and so you couldn’t even get shaved on the street anymore; couldn’t buy a deck of cards either, Bill’s Magic Shop having given way to a ladies’ hat store. A ladies’ hat store. Can you believe it, Billy?

Also Becker’s Tavern had changed hands in the early fifties, and after that nobody paid any attention to the photographic mural behind the bar, mural of two hundred and two shirt-sleeved men at a 1932 clambake. Nobody worried anymore about pasting stars on the chests of those men after they died, the way old man Becker used to. One by one the stars had gone up on those chests through the years; then sometimes a star would fall and be carried off by the sweeper. Stars fell and fell, but they didn’t rise anymore, and so now the dead and the quick were a collage of uncertain fates. Hey, no star on his chest, but ain’t he dead? Who knows? Who gives a goddamn? Put a star on him, why not? Put a star on Becker’s.

One by one we move along and the club as we know it slowly dissolves, not to be reconstituted. “Broadway never sleeps,” Sport always said, but now it did. It slept in the memories of people like him and Billy, men who wandered around the old turf as if it wasn’t really old, as if a brand-new crap table might descend from the sky at any minute — and then, to the music of lightning bolt and thunder clap, the dice would roll again.

But no. No lightning. No thunder. No dice. Just the memory of time gone, and the vision of the vanishing space where the winners and losers, the grifters and suckers, had so vividly filled the air with yesterday’s action.

“They want me to get married,” Billy said to me.

“Who does?”

“Peg. The priest. Agnes.”

“What’s the priest say?”

“He says we’re givin’ scandal with Agnes livin’ in. She’s been with us a year maybe.”

“Then you’re already married, basically.”

“Nah. She’s got her own room. She’s a roomer.”

“Ah, I get it,” I said.

“ ‘Doesn’t look moral,’ the priest says.”

“Well he’s half right, if you worry about that sort of thing.”

“I don’t worry. They worry.”

“What’s Peg say?”

“Peg says she doesn’t give a damn whether I marry the girl or not. But yeah, she wants it too. It’d get the priest off her back.”

“So get married, then,” I said. “You like the girl?”

“She’s great, but how the hell can I get married? I’m fifty-one years old and I don’t have a nickel and don’t know where to get one. I scrounge a little, deal now and then, but I haven’t had steady work since Morty closed the horseroom. And the chiselin’ bastard owes me back wages and two horse bets.”

“How much?”

“About a grand. Little less, maybe.”

“That’s a lot.”

“He said he went dry, couldn’t pay off, said he’d pay me later. But then he went off with Lulu and now he’s runnin’ a floatin’ card game and he don’t listen. I oughta cut his heart out, but it’s even money he don’t have one.”

Billy stopped talking, stopped looking me in the eye. Then, with his voice in a low register and on the verge of a tremolo, he said, “You know, Orson, I never could hold a job. I never knew how to do nothin’. I couldn’t even stay in the army. I got eye trouble and they sent me home after eight months. The horseroom was the longest steady job I ever had.”

“Something’ll turn up,” I said.

“Yeah? Where? I could always get a buck around Broadway but now there ain’t no Broadway.”

Yeah.

Put a star on Billy’s Broadway.

I drank the beer Billy bought me, drank it in silent communion with his unexpected confession. Billy — who had been inhaling money for years in bowling alleys, pool rooms, and card games — was he unemployable? Was he really a man who “never knew how to do nothin’ ”? It’s true Billy found straight jobs laughable, that he left as many as he was fired from, once even calling the foreman of a machine-shop paint gang a moron for presiding over such labor. Liberated by such words, Billy invariably wended his way back to the cocoon of Broadway, within whose bounds existed the only truly usable form of life; or so Billy liked to believe.

I was making a decision about telling him my own tribulations when the door opened and Buffalo Johnny Rizzo walked in, a fashion plate in blue seersucker suit and white Panama hat with a band that matched his suit. He stood in the doorway, hands in his coat pockets, looked us all over, opened his coat and took a pistol from his belt, then fired two shots at his most favored target: Morty Pappas’s crotch, which was forked east toward Broadway, from whence Johnny was just arriving.

Billy saw it all happening and so did I, but Billy acted, lifting his cane from its dangle on bar’s edge into a vivid upthrust and sending Johnny’s pistol flying, but not before Johnny got off two shots. Morty fell from his bar stool with a crumpling plaster thud, his crotch intact but one bullet hitting his good leg, and the other lodging in the neck of the stuffed cow over the back bar, victim yet again of inept shooters.

Sport quickly retrieved the flown pistol and Johnny just as quickly moved toward the aging Sport to get it back and try again for Morty’s gender. Billy and I both stepped between the two men, and Sport, still a formidable figure with the arms and fists of the light heavyweight he had once been, said only, “Better get outa here, John.”

Buffalo Johnny, his failed plan sinking him into the throes of social wisdom, looked then at the fallen and bleeding Morty; and he smiled.

“Boom-boom, fucker,” he said. “Boom-boom. Boom-boom.”

And then he went out onto Broadway.

Except for Billy and me, the customers at Sport’s saloon exited with sudden purpose after Buffalo Johnny left the premises. Sport drew new beers for us as we gave aid and comfort to Morty Pappas in his hour of pain Sport then called an ambulance and together Billy and I organized Morty on the floor, propping him with an overcoat someone had left on a hook during the winter. Sport made a pressure pack on the wound with a clean bar towel.

“So, ya bastard, ya saved my life,” Morty said to Billy between grimaces of agony.

“Yeah,” said Billy. “I figure you’re dead you’ll never pay me what you owe me.”

“You oughta pay him,” Sport said, putting a new beer in Morty’s grip.

“I’ll pay him all right,” and Morty put down the beer and reached for his wallet, a hurtful move. “What do I owe you?”

“You know what you owe me,” Billy said.

“Six hundred,” Morty said.

“That’s wages. Plus the bets, three eighty, that’s nine eighty.”

Morty fumbled with his wallet, took out his cash. “Here. It’s all I got with me,” he said. He yelped with new pain when he moved. Billy took the money, counted it.

“Count it,” said Morty.

“I’m countin’.”

“Four hundred, am I right?”

“Three sixty, three eighty, four.”

“That wacky bastard Rizzo,” Morty said. “They’ll lock him up now. Put him in a fucking dungeon.”

“If they find him,” said Sport.

“He’s too stupid to hide out,” Morty said. “Stupidest man I ever know. He ain’t got the brains God gave a banana.”

“He knows somethin’,” Sport said. “He knows how to shoot you in the leg.”

“How was his broad?” Billy asked.

“She wasn’t his broad.”

“He thought she was.”

“She was hot,” Morty said. “Hot for everybody. Gimme his gun.”

“Whataya gonna do with it?” Sport asked.

“Give it to the cops.”

“I didn’t call the cops,” Sport said.

“They’ll turn up at the hospital.”

“Cops’ll want witnesses,” Billy said. “You got any?”

“You saw,” Morty said.

“Who, me?” Billy said.

“Who’s your friend there?” Morty said, looking at me.

“I never saw him before,” Billy said.

“What’s your name, bud?”

“Bud,” I said.

“All I can remember is my money,” Billy said.

“I was out in the kitchen when it happened,” Sport said.

“You bastards.”

“Pay the man, Morty,” Sport said.

“I got no more cash,” Morty said. “You come to the game, Billy, I’ll back you for what I owe you.” He turned to Sport. “He comes to the game I’ll back him for what I owe him.”

“You on the level?” asked Billy.

“Would I lie at a time like this?”

“You only lie when you move your lips. Where you playin’?”

“Tuesday eight o’clock, Win Castle’s house.”

“Win Castle, the insurance guy?”

“He asked me to run a game for him. He likes to play but he needs players. You play pretty good.”

“You’ll back me?” Billy asked.

“Up to what I owe you,” Morty said.

“Here’s the ambulance,” Sport said.

After they packed Morty off to the hospital I told Billy, “You get me into that card game and I’ll make sure you get your money from Morty.” Then I explained my talent with cards to him, the first time I ever told anybody about it. Giselle knew I gambled but she didn’t know there was no risk involved, that I could cut aces and deal anybody anything. I told Billy how I’d practiced for months in front of the mirror until I could no longer see myself dealing seconds, or bottom cards, and that now it was second nature. Billy was mesmerized. He never expected this out of me.

“They shoot guys they catch doin’ that,” Billy said.

“They shoot guys anyway. Haven’t you noticed?”

“You really good? You know I can spot cheaters.”

“Come over to the house I’ll show you. I can’t show you in public.”

When we got to Colonie Street Billy was vigorously aloof, refused to look at anything in the parlor in a way that would give the thing significance. He came here only when he was obliged to, and left as soon as possible. Now he let his gaze fall on the chandeliers, and sketches, and ancestor paintings, the framed old photos, dried flowers, the bric-a-brac on the mantel, the ancient furniture, the threadbare rugs, and the rest of the antique elegance, and it was all dead to him. He sat in the leather chair by the window where Peter always sat to watch the traffic on Colonie Street, took a sip of the beer I gave him, and then I told him, “You look like your father.”

“They always told me that,” he said.

“I met him just once, in 1934, when your grandmother died. I have some old photos of him upstairs. He’s in a baseball uniform, playing with Chattanooga in the Southern League.”

“He managed that team,” Billy said.

“I know. You want to see the pictures?”

“It don’t matter,” Billy said. “I know what he looked like.”

“He looks very young. My father did a sketch from one of them, a good sketch. In the dining room.”

“Never mind that stuff. Your father wouldn’t let him in this joint when he came home in ’34.”

“That’s not how it was,” I said.

“Just get the cards,” said Billy, and I knew we’d come back to Francis before long. Billy was intimidated by the house, by the memories of his father’s exile from it after his marriage to Annie Farrell, and by his inexact knowledge of Francis’s peculiar visit here when Kathryn died. But here he was, on deck for the family luncheon with the lawyer that would take place in another hour or so. My father, when we organized this luncheon, thought it essential that Billy be present to hear whatever was going to be said, even if he didn’t care about any of it.

The gathering had to do with money, but Peter was tight-lipped about specifics. He knew he was seriously ill and he was putting what was left of his life in order, the way I had put his Malachi Suite in order (with the Leica I’d given Giselle in Germany, and which she gave back to me when I undertook the job), numbering and photographing the hundreds of sketches, watercolors, and oils that my father was obsessively creating, and which had sprawled chaotically in all the upstairs rooms until I put everything into categories.

Peter did not consider the Malachi Suite finished, and I wasn’t sure he ever would. Two days ago he had asked me to hang one of the oils over the dining-room table, the first time he’d exhibited any of the work anywhere in the house outside his studio. It was the painting he called Banishing the Demons, and it showed Malachi and his co-conspirator, Crip Devlin, shooing invisible demons out of Malachi’s cottage, with five others, including a woman in bed, as terrorized witnesses. It is a mysterious and eerie painting, but Peter gave me no explanation of why he wanted it on the dining-room wall.

“Where’s your old man now?” Billy asked me.

“Upstairs sleeping,” I said. “He gets up at dawn, works till he drops, then goes back to bed.”

“Another screwball in the family.”

“Without a doubt. You gettin’ hungry?”

“In a while.”

“We’ll have lunch. Molly is bringing food, and Giselle’s due in on the noon train. You never met Giselle, did you?”

“I heard about her. I seen that stuff she did about your father in a magazine.”

“She’ll be here. So will Peg.”

“What’s happening?”

“A get-together.”

“I’ll get outa your hair,” Billy said.

“Not at all. You stick around. You should be here.”

“Who says I should?”

“I do.”

“You wanna show me your card tricks, is that it?”

“Right,” I said, and I found the cards in a cabinet and we went to the dining-room table, site of two notable crises in the life of Billy’s father; and I wondered if Billy knew anything about the day Francis fell into the china closet. Billy took a long look at the sketch Peter had done of Francis and then we sat down with the cards. When I started to shuffle the deck I realized Billy was the only man I trusted totally in this life. After he confessed to me that he never knew how to do nothin’, I felt bonded to him, and to his father, in a way that seemed new to me; and as I performed for him with the cards, I knew I was going to tell him about my nosedive in Germany. I dealt us both a hand of blackjack.

“Was that straight or seconds?” I asked him.

“Seconds?”

“Wrong.” And I turned up the cards to show him the ordinary cards I’d dealt. Then I dealt again, asked again.

“Straight,” he said.

“Wrong again,” and I showed him the ace and king I’d dealt myself.

“You’re good,” he said. “I can’t see anything.”

“The best ones you never see.”

“Why you doin’ this shit? You got a brain. You don’t hafta cheat cards.”

“You’re right, Billy,” I said. “I don’t have to cheat at cards. But it’s a talent I acquired early, the way you learned how to play pool when you were in short pants. We tend to use our talents, don’t we? We also tend to follow our demons. We’ll do anything to gain a little power over life, since none of us know our limits until we’re challenged — and that’s when the strangeness begins.”

Billy just stared at me. He didn’t know what I was getting at, but he’d understand. He was uneducated, but he was smart as hell.

“There I was,” I said, “a little kid backstage, watching Manfredo organize his magic, putting birds in the hat, rabbits in the armpit, cards up both sleeves. He was a whiz, and I wanted to know his secrets. He’d shoo me away so he could be alone with my mother, but I’d insist on another trick, more know-how, and he’d always give in to get rid of me. By the time I was seven I was learning the key-and-lock trick, and by nine I could deal seconds and read the marked decks Manfredo used in his act. He even taught me how to palm cup-poker dice, control two out of five dice in your hand, but I never liked the game.

“Cards were my game and look where they led me. You knew I’d gotten into trouble in Germany, but you didn’t know I was part of an international currency scam, did you?” Billy looked at me as if he’d never seen me before. I was rising in his esteem: more of a screwball than he thought.

“It all started with an army card game I played in,” I said, “first to finance my love affair with Giselle, and then to support our marriage, all of which led me to conclude that there are no rules; that anything can develop out of anything, chaos out of conjugality, madness out of magic. .”

Three

I’ll talk now about that game and its consequences, because that’s where things started going down. My fellow players were the Captain, Walt Popp (we played at his apartment), Archie Bell, a warrant officer with the worst body odor I’d ever smelled, Herm Jelke, a nasty second-lieutenant runt with a Clark Gable mustache that made him look like a wax dummy, and my kid cousin, Dan Quinn, Peg and George’s son, who had written about poker as a sports writer and for which reason the Captain, considering him an expert, invited him.

I’d gotten Quinn into our section after he’d finished basic training in a heavy-weapons company. He was a corporal, the only enlisted man in the poker game, and he played well and honestly and had a good time and lost. I didn’t want him playing at all, but there he was.

I won money regularly for months, not a great deal, but enough to handle my scaled-down plan for keeping Giselle dazzled. She and I focused on the restaurants of Frankfurt, all of them within range of my military wages, even the Bruckenkeller and the outdoor café with violins at the Frankfurter Hof. We took day trips to Wiesbaden and Bad Nauheim for the baths and the Spielbanks, where we swam, bathed in steam, and spectated at the roulette and baccarat. We wandered the ruins of Frankfurt and took pictures of each other standing in the rubble of the opera house, or in somebody’s exploded parlor, or on the altar of a church with no roof, or in Goethe’s bedroom, or trying to find Schopenhauer’s old digs in Sachenhausen. I recounted Schopenhauer’s argument for Giselle: that the body is the objectification of the will. Tooth and penis, eye and vagina, were all created by the needs of the soul, no? Well, maybe. But Schopenhauer loathed women and called his white poodle Atma, the Soul of the World. I told Giselle she was the soul of my world, vividly isolating life for me: golden hair with violin, perfect knees crossed for wild arousal as taxi moves along Hauptwache. Phantom queen as art object. Clearly an existence such as hers was not happenstance. Clearly some arcane will had divined this glorious object in order to reflect what will demanded beauty must become. Schopenhauer had a point.

“I love the way you talk to me,” she said.

In these rapturous days she and I came to understand each other ever more intimately, finding where our intensities lurked, how soon boredom enveloped us, and why. Her goal, she said, was freedom, and she felt free with me.

“I think I want to be with you from now on,” she said.

I took kindly to this idea.

“Life traps you,” she said. “It trapped my father when the Gestapo shot him for hiding two Jews. But they didn’t kill him; they just shot him and left him there in the courtyard, and he became an invalid and made my mother his bedside prisoner for three years, until he finally died.”

“You don’t want to be a prisoner,” I said.

“I think not.”

“Did you love your father?”

“Tremendously. But it was pitiful how my mother withered. My brothers took her gallery away from her in 1948. She had Picassos, Van Goghs, Mirós she’d kept hidden all during the war years and she wouldn’t sell them. My brothers couldn’t stand that money being there, inaccessible to them.”

“You didn’t want the money?”

“I wanted my mother to keep everything, but they got the paintings away from her and sold them. And then she died too. A prisoner with no money.”

“But she loved your father.”

“I suppose she did.”

“Then she was a willing prisoner.”

“I couldn’t say. She did her duty, as you military people say.”

I vowed not to become a prisoner. I vowed not to let Giselle become one. I vowed I would have money enough for us to live idyllic lives of love and freedom. I vowed to keep her with me now and tomorrow; always now, always tomorrow. That was my best-laid plan, and the reason I again became a poker player.

I preferred five players to six or seven, for I handled the cards more often. I told my fellow gamesters how great a player I was, how I knew cards. I told them how Nick the Greek, by the third card in a five-card-stud game, could call everybody’s hole card, and that I was Nick’s spiritual disciple. I intimidated them, and I became the one to beat. When I lost they were buoyant at the braggart’s fall. That was my method, of course, putting their money where my mouth was.

I didn’t mind keelhauling Popp, who could afford it, or Jelke, who was a schmuck, but I trod lightly with the Captain when I nailed him (“With all due respect for your rank and position, Captain, I must raise you thirty dollars”), for he was angry enough at me already and I didn’t want to be sent down to a line company. I had to keep an eye on Quinn’s earnestness, and watch over Archie too, but Arch was a sap gambler who didn’t mind losing.

The game went on for months and slowly I built a bankroll to finance my addiction to Giselle’s joys. We played for scrip, the dollar-equivalent currency the army had used since 1946, but sometimes players used German marks, at the legal rate of four marks to the dollar. The Captain often played with marks, for he was getting fat from his black-market deals. His sisters in Bridgeport sent him huge cartons of tea, coffee, cocoa, and cigarettes, and he’d sell it all to Germans at quadruple his investment. I’d done a bit of that too, but it smacked of grocery clerking, and so I concentrated on the game and sold my scrip winnings for the street price of five marks to the dollar, a modest profit, but the way to go as long as Giselle and I were cultivating rapture on the German economy.

And then Italy loomed, for I’d proposed to Giselle and told her we’d honeymoon in Venice. To do this right I needed dollars, not marks, and I mentioned during the game that because of stateside publicity on military black marketeering, the army was hovering over us all, their gumshoes noting who exchanged how many marks for how many dollars in excess of our monthly wages. I wondered out loud where to change marks for bucks outside army channels.

“I know somebody,” Archie said. “Not a very savory character.”

“Who is he?” asked the Captain before I could ask.

Archie said his street name was Meister Geld, and that he could be reached through the Rhineland Bar, off Kaiserstrasse near the Hauptbahnhof, an arena of whores, beer halls, and black marketeers. But, said Arch, if you’re in uniform they won’t let you in. I was ready for that. The uniform was required everywhere in Germany but I’d picked up civilian clothes for traveling, and had also bought a cheap blue German suit, a chalk-stripe double-breasted with ridiculously wide lapels. I’d bought it one size too small so whenever I put it on I ceased looking American and could pass for a working-class German. The suit seemed just right for living anonymously, or hanging out in an off-limits bar, which is what the Rhineland was.

Six years after the surrender Germany remained treacherous, full of entropic hatred. Some of the hate eventually found outlets: packs of GIs breaking fascist heads during binges of vengeance; GIs found face down in the gutter with two broken arms, or floating in the river with a knife in the back, or a slit throat. Too many killings and maimings took place in or near the Rhineland, a watering hole for unreconstructed Nazis, so the MPs put it off limits. A weathered sign in English was tacked to the door of the club:

Dear Mr. G.I. Sorry but you cannot come in.

Tonight is open only to club members.

The Manager

I went in and ordered a schnapps and sat across from a chesty, frizzy-haired woman I took to be a whore. She smiled at me and I smiled back and shook my head no. When the bartender brought my drink I asked him about Meister Geld and he said, “Nicht verstehen.” I repeated the question in French and invoked Archie Bell as my contact, but the barman still didn’t get me. The woman came to my table and asked in French what I wanted and when I told her she said the barman didn’t know anybody by that name but she did, and then in English asked, “What you want with Meister Geld?”

“It has to do with money,” I told her.

She made a phone call and came back and said she would take me to him. I drank my schnapps and we went out. It was April in Frankfurt, a sunny day with a bit of a nip to it, and I made a mental note to buy a lighter-weight German suit for the summer.

“You speak bad French,” the woman said, taking my arm. “Why not speak you English to the man?”

“I didn’t want him to know I was American.”

“But you look like American, speak German like American, have American haircut. The man said polite, please leave, American.”

I shrugged and wondered was my disguise also transparent to the MPs? I walked with the young woman, who, erect, had a provocative shape and sprightly gait. The phrase “abundantly frolicsome” occurred to me. I asked her how long she’d been a whore and she said she’d worked as a mechanic for the Luftwaffe during the war, now repaired auto engines, and only sometimes worked as a whore.

“Where are we going?” I asked her.

“It does not matter,” she said. “He follow us where we go.”

“Who does?”

“Meister Geld. He always look to people before he meets. We go here,” and she pointed to a café with a window full of seven-layer chocolate cakes, cream tarts, glazed Apfelkuchen, and other ambrosial wonders. She said she loved sweet food and then ordered two kinds of chocolate cake. She was rosencheeked, a characteristic in many German women that I took to be seasonal, or perhaps dietetic. Her face, with very modest makeup, was a map of sensuality, her eyes wizened with what I construed to be sexual wisdom. Her tight sweater covered only unencumbered natural uplift. Was there a reason beyond money that she became a whore?

“Only money,” she said. “For money I used to carry a piece of carpet so when I lay down in the ruins to fuck my boys I would not tear my clothes. I made much money but later I am unhappy that I will die in disgrace. Now I want to live only old and please self, so I eat sweet cake. I hungry now. In war days I only sometimes hungry, sometimes whore. Now I always hungry, always whore. Now I live to eat.”

I nodded and asked when Meister Geld was coming. She looked in my eye and said, “I know you do not want me, but I always pay for cake.”

She opened her blouse and presented her naked breasts to my gaze. They were abundant and firm, underlined below by a long, jagged horizontal scar on her stomach. “Gift from lover,” she said, touching the scar. She closed her blouse and stood up.

“I know nobody with name Meister Geld,” she said. “It is silly name.” Then she left the café.

What was I to make of that? Conned out of two pieces of cake by a sugar whore? Was that all there was to it? I paid the check, and as I left the café, thinking about my next move, a black Mercedes pulled alongside me; and from the rear seat came a greeting.

“Good afternoon, Lieutenant. I have your tidings from Archie Bell,” this in very good English from a man in a dark blue leather coat, and a dark suit of color and cut not unlike the suit on my back. The man was corpulent, with the red beard of a Viking warrior. I judged him to be forty.

“Meister Geld?” I asked, and when he smiled and opened the car door I got in beside him.

In my hierarchy of personal demons at the time of the fall, Meister Geld holds a position of eminence. He had been wounded by the weather in December, 1941, on the day the Russians stopped Hitler at Stalingrad. Forty-two degrees below zero, and his left foot froze into the similitude of marble; a frozen foot as good as a bullet in the chest. He ran barefoot in the snow to gain circulation, then stole a felt shoe from a Russian soldier who lay dead in the street, needless of the shod life. He did not steal the Russian’s right shoe but kept his own, a piece of cracked leather. His foot of marble recovered in the felt, but his right foot congealed and died inside the sodden leather. Also a hole in his glove cost him his right thumb.

The Meister told me all this when he saw me staring at that peculiar ersatz thumb: an unlikely length of glove-covered hard rubber, tied with a finger-threading thong. And, in the shoe where the front half of his foot used to be, a piece of toe-shaped wood. Why had the Meister not understood his thumb was freezing? Why had he not stolen the Russian’s right shoe along with the left? Look to the minor devils of war for answers.

My simple task, to change two thousand marks for dollars, was achieved in the first moments of talking, the Meister excavating from a vast interior coat pocket a leather bag thick with banknotes, and giving me the going street rate of exchange.

“A formidable amount of marks, Lieutenant,” the Meister said. “You have been saving your pfennigs.”

“Some belong to an associate of mine,” I said.

“Archie Bell?”

“No. Archie handles his own.”

“So you not only deal in money, you are also a courier for others. And out of uniform. You have the air of the adventurer about you, Lieutenant.”

The thought pleased me. I began to think of myself as Orson-at-large, Orson-on-the-town. Other than manipulating cards and a few black-market cigarette sales, I had done very little in life that could be construed as illegal. My moral stance on cards was that it was a survival tactic; also I gave back as much as I stole, although not always to the same citizens. I knew I was an adept, a figure of reasonable power in an unreasonable world, flush now with money, love awaiting at the other end of a taxi ride, Europe at my doorstep, needful only of a weekend or three-day pass to know the glories of civilized empire, including the empires of love, lust, beauty, and freedom (temporal for the moment, but longitude will develop; all things wait on the man who embraces the muse of freedom). And now, as I rode in the Mercedes with an underworld figure of notable dimension, I moved into a realm of possibility that included illegalities permissible to The Man Who Is, always stopping short of what might be considered serious criminality, of course. No need to venture that far into a new career.

Meister Geld took me to a small movie theater where we stood in the back and watched a scene from a German melodrama in black and white: A woman in a kitchen backs away from a threatening man and reaches for a knife. Close on the knife, as man of menace, undeterred, comes toward her. She thrusts. Close on knife entering his stomach. He crumples. She backs away, runs out of house. Close on man, dead. He opens eyes, removes knife from his stomach, no wound visible, rises, puts knife in sink, no blood visible on it, opens cabinet, takes down whiskey, pours self a drink, drinks, looks toward door, smiles.

The Meister grew bored and climbed the stairs to a second- floor office beside the windowed projection booth, the office similarly windowed to give access to the screen. The office was cluttered with German movie posters and photographs of naked women. The Meister hung his coat upon a hook, sat in his leather chair, and asked: “Do you like to travel, Lieutenant? May I call you Orson?”

“Travel pleases me. Orson is my name.”

“One may make a great deal of money by traveling, especially if one is an American officer like yourself.”

“I’m in the mood for money,” I said.

“From the black market?”

“Everybody does it.”

“The army frowns on it.”

“But they do very little to discourage it, especially among officers. My partner in this deal is another officer.”

“I can’t tell you how it pleases me to hear this,” said the Meister. “I sense an alliance of substance.”

In agreeing to travel for the Meister, I perceived a change in my attitude toward myself and others. Clearly, I thought and acted faster and with more resolution than other men, knew what others would think before they thought it, knew, for instance, when I caught the Captain biting his nails, and he then guiltily hid his hands, that he was behaving like a recidivist thumbsucker, which is to say an autoeroticist. How swift the demon Orson — or is it Oreson-Whoreson? — faster by a whisker than old Freud devoid.

As he listened, the Meister unfolded the tale of his childhood in the war, early soldierhood in the Wehrmacht, surviving the bombings of Frankfurt, aiding in their aftermath (his half a foot then only a stump), putting out fires, carrying wounded to belowground shelters. The boy into man became the peddler who could get anybody anything at a price by the time he was twenty-three. He crossed into the British, French, and Russian zones during the early occupation years with great ease and casualness, owning papers of four nations, fluent in five tongues, and with a sixth sense for survival.

He stole an artificial leg from the hospital where he recuperated, sold the leg to an amputee for two hundred cigarettes, bartered the cigarettes for a live pig, traded the pig to a butcher who supplied the mayor of Darmstadt in exchange for the loan of a Leica and a roll of film, bided his time until he had secretly photographed an American lieutenant colonel in bed with three Fräuleins and a Doberman pinscher, blackmailed the colonel into lending him his automobile, drove to the officers’ quarters and cleaned out another colonel’s vast hoard of medicine, chocolate, uniforms, military insignia, and whiskey, imposed these gifts on a black marketeer known as the King of Mannheim, and earned himself the right to deal in currency for the King, which was his goal from the outset.

The Meister carried a pistol, which was visible in the crotch of his left arm, and as he dropped references to this killing, that murder attempt, I grew wary of getting thick with his mission, which I had yet to understand. But as he unraveled the operation, I again grew comfortable, because I would be dealing with legitimate life: buying money at banks, using legitimate dollars that I could easily have come by legally. I lost my fear and entered into the brilliance of a solvent future, one in which I would crown Giselle the queen of all fortune, and where we would reign as sovereigns of a post-military life in the haut monde.

The Meister’s method was a complex cycle of money in motion. On the street he sold marks to Americans for scrip, turned the scrip into greenbacks through a network of American army associates (like myself) by legal means, buying money orders, for instance; then sent me and others to Switzerland with the greenbacks, where we bought German marks at considerably less than their value in the American sector of Germany. Back in Frankfurt we’d take our cut, and the Meister would then sell the marks for scrip at a profit, turn the scrip into greenbacks, and off we’d go again to Switzerland on our moneycycle.

The danger was minimal. Military personnel underwent baggage inspection at the American zone’s exit points, but I had educated luggage and also the inspection of officers was usually perfunctory for officers are honest — except the Captain, who was a grand thief in his heart, a petty thief in his skin. It was he who owned half the marks I first changed with the Meister, and it was he who saw dollar signs in his dreams after I told him of the Meister’s scheme.

What can I say of international currency violation? Not much more than that it’s the rape of the system. The Swiss have been fucking the rest of the world with their secret vaults for generations. What the Meister and I did was to join the game.

It would have taken me years to get rich on this arrangement, but I did finance my marriage and honeymoon, did fulfill the vision of Venice as altar and nuptial bed — Giselle and I afloat on the Grand Canal, stroked along in our gondola of desire, knowing that today is tomorrow, and tomorrow is forever, and that we will be in ecstasy, we will be rich and free, and we will manifest our own destiny forever; and not only will we never die, we will not even grow old. That’s what I told Giselle the night before we returned to Germany and I was arrested by the Military Police.

They interrogated me for two days, then let me go but confined me to quarters, not as a total prisoner, but restricted to one room and the grounds at headquarters Kaserne, where the MPs were billeted. They escorted me to chow and kept checking to see that I hadn’t gone off. Being a married officer, I’d had my own apartment in an army housing project close to the center of the city, but I could no longer live there.

They knew that two other officers were involved with the scam — my boss, the Captain, and Warrant Officer Archie Bell. They transferred Archie to Korea but sent the Captain to cushy London, which led me to believe that the Captain was the informer in the case. Vengeance is my estimate of his motive, since I took Giselle away from him. The police must have known he was dealing, confronted him, and he ratted. And there I was, an upstanding citizen, suddenly thrust among outcasts, thrown into an underworld role for which I had small talent and less stomach.

Right after they checked on me I dressed and left the Kaserne, walked past the guard at the gate and took his salute, then caught a taxi to my apartment, where I changed into my German suit. Giselle was at work and I decided not to leave her a note. I’ve always quested after mystery, and as I studied myself in the mirror I realized that the Orson of the past was gone forever. I took all the cash I had in the drawer, slicked my hair with Vaseline, put on the leather coat I’d bought in emulation of Meister Geld, and stepped out into the Teutonic darkness.

I went looking for the Meister, my first stop being his movie theater. The usher said he’d never heard of anybody named Meister Geld and I realized then that I didn’t know the man’s real name, or if he had one. The usher grew impatient and said if I wanted to go inside I’d have to buy a ticket, and I did.

A military hanging was in process in the film. A much-decorated warrior wearing his uniform and medals ascends to the gallows, and disdains the hood that covers a hanged man’s death gasp. Hangman loops rope around his neck, man proudly strokes his medals, and hangman weeps as trapdoor springs. Close on face of hanged man: tongue out, eyes all but exploded. Hold on face as eyes return to normal, tongue recedes into mouth. View on military guards weeping as they look at hanging man. Close on hanged man, dead and smiling. His eyes suddenly open, his smile widens, and he laughs.

I went up the stairs toward the office by the projection booth. It was as I remembered, but empty: no movie posters, no naked women, no furniture, telephone, or rug. Meister the Magnificent had made himself disappear. The usher came in behind me, said I shouldn’t be up here, and ushered me out into the night. I circled several blocks, looking for the Meister’s car, my peregrinations bringing me eventually to the only other place where I knew to look for him, the Rhineland Bar. It was busy with a mix of men and women, whores and pimps, and I sought my main connection, the sugar whore, but without success. I wanted to see her again expose her scar, the validity of which I had begun to doubt. Was it pasted on? Tattooed? Drawn? Would it run during sex, or come off on your stomach? Would you then be scarred?

Sitting with a whore who was not as attractive as my sugar whore was a corporal from Seventh Army who had worked as a courier for the Meister. All I knew him by was Bosco, which may or may not have been his name. And when I had this thought I realized how very little I knew about any of my co-conspirators. I’d met Bosco in Switzerland, where the Meister had sent him with greenbacks — to deliver to me — for the purchase of German marks, the Meister reasoning that I was the more suave, more cosmopolitan figure to deal with bankers.

Bosco, now in civilian clothes, looked like a character out of the funny sheets of my childhood, Wash Tubbs. He was short with glasses and wiry black curls all over his head. I found him a mix of regular-army rube and bright, wily skuldugger. We’d had drinks on two occasions and talked of the Meister, about whom Bosco was mysterious but portentous. What I took home from him was that the Meister not only dabbled in the black market, the currency conduit, and the flesh exchange, but Bosco also hinted vaguely at the more exalted intrigue of politics. And that implied politics. Was the Meister an agent? A double agent? A provocateur? A hired political killer? I couldn’t say. But that’s how the imagination went.

I went over to Tubbs-Bosco and greeted him with a question: “Zigarette, bitte?” He smiled, proffered a Lucky Strike, and asked me to sit down beside his whore, whom I glanced at with a certain shock to the system, for she looked very like my Aunt Molly, one of the grand people of the universe. I squinted at her, disbelieving my eyes, and saw she looked not like Molly at all but really like Juliette Levinsky, a blond Jewess of great beauty who was the love of my life for a year or more, and yet this woman was not a blonde; and when I looked at her from another angle she resembled neither Molly nor Juliette. Clearly this face required further scrutiny.

“Have you seen the Meister?” I asked Bosco.

“Not since before the fall,” he said.

“Which fall is that?” I asked.

“Fall? Fall? What do you mean fall?” he asked.

“I mean fall. It’s what you said. Whose fall? What fall are you talking about?”

“That’s my question,” he said.

“The Meister,” I said. “Where is he?”

“I wish I knew the answer to that,” Bosco said.

“When did you see him last?”

“Last week. We had a meal together. We both had Heilbutt vom Rost, mit Toast.”

“What do I care what you ate? Where is he? He’s no longer at the theater.”

“He sold the theater,” Bosco said.

“Heilbutt vom Rost is my favorite German dish,” I said. “I had it on Good Friday, with Krauterbutter.”

“The Captain threw you in, of course. You knew that.”

“I suppose I did,” I said.

“I’d have him killed, if I were you,” said Bosco.

“That’s extreme,” I said. “Not my way. I admit I considered it, however.”

“The Captain’s in London,” Bosco said. “Living it up at the Strand and the Ritz, dining out at the Connaught and Brown’s Hotel, shopping on Savile Row, screwing all the girls in Soho. And you call yourself a spy?”

“I never call myself a spy,” I said.

I looked at the whore. She looked like my third-grade teacher, who used to rub herself against the edge of the desk while lecturing us: A beautiful woman. A tall redhead with long blond hair. She was smitten with me. Followed my career all through grammar school. No one quite like her, the sweet little dolly.

“Heilbutt vom Rost I could go for right now,” I said.

“I can get it for you half price,” Bosco said.

“Where’s Geld?” I asked.

“Geld is where you find him,” Bosco said. “In the Russian zone by this time, I’d venture.”

“You always said he was a double agent.”

“No, I merely suggested that he was a provocateur-killer with a finger in every political honeycomb in Europe. Even his toenails are illegal. He’s a great man. He’s entitled to finger anything or anybody he pleases. You know who the greatest man in the world is?”

“Of course,” I said. “Harry Truman. For dropping the bomb on Hiroshima. I never thought so many were undoable.”

“And the second-greatest man in the world?”

“The pilot who bombed Hiroshima. Think of the night sweats and headaches he’s had to put up with ever since.”

“In my opinion,” Bosco said, “there’s only one war, with intermissions.”

“That’s how it should be,” I said. “Let me tell you the greatest bunch of men I ever came across. The glory brigades who landed at Normandy on D Day, pissy with fear, climbing that fucking cliff into the path of those fortified Nazi cock-suckers, soaked to the soul in blood, brine, sand, and shit, choking with putrescible courage and moving ahead into the goddamn vortex of exploding death. Who’s got balls? Those guys had cojones big as combat boots. I arrived two weeks after Normandy, a goddamn latecomer, a slacker, a shitassed mewling little yellowbelly, and I got separated from my outfit for three days with no food or water and then I saw a Nazi, a fat fucking killer of women and children and newborn baby Jews, an asswipe shitface murdering swine of a fucking Nazi prick, and I got him in my sights and shot him through the nose. Then somebody shot at me. It was dusk. I couldn’t see where the shot came from, but obviously he had a Kamerad on his flank, and so I went back into my cave, my earthworks, and laid low. Four days without food by this time, and we piss and moan when we miss a meal. I crawled as far into my earthworks as earth would allow and I heard someone up there walking around calling, “Here, doggie, come on, nice little doggie,” all this with a kraut accent, of course, thinking I’d fall for the old dog-biscuit offer. He probably didn’t even have a dog biscuit. Then it grew silent and I went dead out, probably slept two more days. It might’ve been a month. Who knows how long, or how well, or how deeply, or how significantly, or how richly, or how comfortably we sleep when we’re fucking asleep? We’re asleep, aren’t we? So how the hell are we supposed to know how well, or how deeply, and so on? But to get to the point — are you with me?”

“Dogfood,” said Bosco.

“Good,” I said. “So I came up from the earthworks, crawling out like some goddamn creature of the substructure, some toad of the underground river, some snake of the primeval slime, some cockroach from the cooling ooze of creation. I came up and looked out into the sky and saw it was fucking dawn or fucking twilight, what you will. Another fucking crepuscular moment, let’s call it. And I said to myself, it’s going to be all fucking right in half an hour. But what was going to be all right?”

“There’s a question on the floor,” Bosco said.

“Exactly,” I said. “What is it?”

“Crepuscularity,” he said.

“Of course. So I surveyed the scene as best I could and saw that the Nazi I’d shot through the nose was still there in the distance. I had a perfect vision of how he’d fallen, how his helmet went up on the right ear, how the blood coursed down his ex-nose into his mouth, et cetera. I listened for any telltale sign of that sly fucker with the goddamned dog biscuits and I stayed put but made demarcative notations in my brain of what lay between that Nazi son of a bitch and myself, what approximate distance I had to traverse, for I had already decided, with a form of self-defense made known to me by every cell in my body, that if I did not eat within several minutes I would die.

“I have no stomach for death, especially my own, and so I calculated the hectares, the rods, and the metrical leftovers between the Nazi and me, and I slithered on my belly like a lizard up from the putrid slush, the foul paste, the vomitous phlegm of a slop-jar swamp, and in time I reached my target, of whose freshness I was assured, unless I had been asleep for several days. I took his helmet off, cut off his head and let it roll, sliced his clothing, ripped him up the middle and cut a split steak off his stomach, turned him over and cut two chops off his buttocks, stuck him in the gizzard and ripped him sideways just so he’d remember me, slithered back to my cave with the steak and chops in his helmet, waited till dark, sealed up the cave so no fire would be seen, cut out a chimney for the smoke, then dined on filet of Nazi, chops on the Rhine, and lived to tell the tale.”

The whore looked me in the eye.

“You made steak and chops out of a German soldier?” she inquired.

“Where’d you ever get an idea like that?” I asked her.

“You just said it.”

“I wasn’t talking to you. Whores should be fucked but not heard.”

She signaled to a man at the bar who was a perfect double of the hanged man in the film I’d just seen. Clearly there is a problem of identity here, I thought, as four of the men at the bar (one looking incredibly like the Captain) moved toward our booth and separated me from Bosco and the blond whore forever.

The hanged man came for me, while the other three converged on Bosco. We all went down as they stomped and punched us, then dragged us to our feet with the intention, I presume, of taking us elsewhere to cut our throats. But the hanged man could not resist punching me one more time while one of his fellows held me. Incredibly, I wrenched myself loose, though not in time to escape the punch, which sent me reeling backward toward the front door of the bar.

“You Nazi carbuncle,” I said to the hanged man, and the thought came to me then of how well I used the language, and that if I pursued the writing life seriously I might become as successful in one art form as my father had been in another. The sugar whore came into the bar as I was reeling toward the door and when she saw me falling she let me fall, then took me by the arm and raised me up. This interrupted my beating and I gathered my wits and kicked the hanged man in the vicinity of the scrotum, causing him what I’d estimate to be moderate pain. While two thugs dragged Bosco toward the back room, I grabbed the sugar whore by the hand, thinking how our visions, even in dreams, define us, how we are products of the unfathomable unknown, how, for instance, I knew that my sugar whore was not a whore at all but a transpositional figure — Joan of Arc, Kateri Tekakwitha, St. Teresa of Avila — sent to ferry me out of danger; and, knowing this, I realized how superior I was to all in this barroom, how few people in the world could have such a beatific vision in this situation, and I pitied the crowd of them as I grabbed the whore by the wrist and ran with her out into the night streets of Frankfurt, where we would romp as lovers should, I, a prince of this darkness, about to embrace the saintly and virginal lark.

“Will they come after us?” I asked the whore.

“There is time and chance in all things,” she said.

When she said that, I could not resist putting my hand under her blouse to touch the scar I had seen, if it was a scar. I felt the ridges of it, let my fingers move upward between her mounds, touch her tips.

“Not here, not now, my darling,” she said, her voice a chorus of holy venereal rhapsodies.

We walked on dark streets, in time coming to the banks of the Main River. On an embankment where grass grew amid the rubble, a figure dressed as a bat knelt over a supine blond woman whom I recognized as the librarian I unrequitedly loved for two years during adolescence. What retribution, I thought. How cruelly the Godhead dispenses justice. The librarian was bleeding from several orifices.

“Don’t look,” my sugar whore said, and so I kissed her opulent mouth and put my hand under her skirt, stroking the naked thigh, the tender curve of her posterior puffs.

“Not here, not now, my darling,” she said.

I began to see the pattern: Bosco in the pay of the Meister, who was in the pay of Archie Bell of G-2, the main connection to army intelligence, Archie’s cover blown by my arrest and so he is shipped to Korea to bide his time for subsequent return; and the Meister moves to the Russian zone, where he is at home, and will now be viewed as a fugitive from the very structure to which he still gives allegiance; though naturally he is a double-bladed allegiant, without pride, without pity, the pluperfect hypocrite with yet a third face toward any allegiance that offers him the solace of money, or pudenda. There he will sit, accumulating slaves in his icecap of Slavic disorder, a Pharaoh, a Buddha, a slavering three-headed Cerberus, lackey to the gluttonous, glutinous garbagemasters of east and west, the accumulators, the suppurating spawn of cold-war politics, putrid fiscality, and ravenous libido.

“Not here, not now, my darling,” said my sweet whore of this magical night as I raised her blouse for a bit of a suck.

We walked hand in hand toward the riverbank and both of us pointed to the same thing in the same instant. There, bobbing on the surface of the water, moving slowly with the current, came Bosco-Tubbs, minus his glasses, his head rotating as it bobbed, and for a moment I thought of leaping in and saving the man from drowning. But then, when he bobbed sideways, I perceived clearly that his head was connected to no body, only skull flesh, with livid neck fractions dangling free, and I knew it was pointless to effect a rescue. He was too far gone.

“Not here, not now, my darling,” said my honeypot, pushing my hand away from the concatenation of her thighs.

“May we go somewhere, then,” I asked, “and spend a gentle hour together?”

“We can go where my pimp lives,” she said. “Would you like that?”

“Is it far?” I asked.

“About ten miles,” she said.

“That’s a long walk,” I said.

“We could take the Strassenbahn. You take the number four and then transfer to the number six, then take the yellow bus and transfer to the red bus, and there you are.”

“It would be easier if we drove,” I said, and with my Swiss knife I slit the canvas top of an old Mercedes convertible parked in front of us, hotwired it as a detective had taught me when I was covering the police beat, and away we went into the rosy-fingered dawn, moving out of fucking crepuscularity at last.

Four

It was about an hour before dawn when I called Giselle to tell her I’d stolen a German policeman’s car and was with a whore named Gisela at a place called Fritz’s Garden of Eden. I said I’d fallen in love with the whore because her name was the German correlative of Giselle. I think this miffed Giselle, but she nevertheless got out of bed and dressed, and as she was going out the door she thought of her camera.

I’d given her that Leica thirty-five-millimeter with wide-angle lens, filters, light meter, the works, infecting her with light and shadow. She had moved well beyond the usual touristy snaps of me at the Köln Cathedral, or the Wurzburg Castle, and had come to think of the camera as her Gift of Eyes, the catalyst for her decision to seek out the images that lurk on the dark side of the soul. She was beginning to verify her life through the lens of her camera, while I, of a different order, was pursuing validation through hallucination, which some have thought to be demonic; and I suppose I have courted the demonic now and again.

I once told Giselle she was the essence of the esemplastic act, for as she was giving me the curl of her tongue at that moment, she would pause to speak love words to me in three languages. That spurred me to lecture her on unity, a Greek derivation. “There is no shortage of unity but much of it is simulated,” I began. “The one from the many is no more probable than many from the one. Only sea life propagates in solitude. But here, behold the esemplastic!. . the unity of twain — I speaking, you comprehending, I delivering, you receiving, I the supplicant, you the benefactor, I me, you thee (I was within her at that moment), and yet we are loving in a way that is neither past, present, nor future, but only conditional: a time zone that is eternally renewable, in flux with mystery, always elusive, and may not even exist.”

She didn’t know what I was talking about, but here I was, back in that elusive time zone at Fritz’s Garden of Eden, melting with the heat of love and penance when she arrived. I was standing on what passed for a bar in this hovel of depravity, holding a glass of red wine, in shirtsleeves, delivering a singsong harangue to my audience, and biting myself on the right hand. Giselle wondered: Is he really biting himself?

“Jesus was the new Adam, and I report to you that I am the new Jesus,” I proclaimed, and then bit myself just below the right shoulder, and everybody laughed. A stain spread on my sleeve as I talked. Giselle thought it was a wine stain.

“Jesus descended into hell, and what did he find? He found my wonderful, lascivious mother, my saintly, incestuous father. He found all of you here, this carnival of panders and half-naked whores, scavenger cripples, easy killers, and poxy blind men. He found you burglars and dope fiends, you crutch thieves and condom salesmen, you paralytic beggars and syphilitic hags, all doomed and damned to this malignant pigmire for an eternity of endless and timeless sin.”

The audience hooted and whistled its approval of my sermon (Giselle took a photo of them) and I laughed wildly and bit myself on the palm of my left hand, then dripped blood from my thumb into my wineglass (Giselle took another photo, sending the carnival into a new eruption of applause). What she had thought to be wine was obviously my blood, and so she moved closer to where I could see her, and when she came into view I stopped my harangue. I snatched up my coat, jumped down from the bar, sucking my hand and balancing my wine, and I kissed Giselle on the mouth with my bloody lips. She backed off from me and raised her camera.

“I want you to see yourself as you are tonight,” she said to me, and I opened both palms outward to show her where I had invested myself with the stigmata of the new Jesus.

“We must leave,” I said to her. “They all want to kill me for my coat and suit. And they’ll kill both of us for your camera.”

“Where is your whore?” she asked me.

“She’s working, over there,” I said, and I pointed to the table where my Gisela was fellating the handless wrist of a one-eyed beggar whose good hand was somewhere inside her blouse.

Giselle rapidly snapped photos of this, and of the entire mob, as the rabble eyed us and whispered. I broke my wineglass on the floor as we retreated, insuring that at least the barefoot and shoeless freaks would think twice before following us. We fled Fritz’s Garden, leaped into the stolen Mercedes, and I then drove through the dark streets and woodlands of Frankfurt, zigzagging at wild speed, turning on two wheels (or so it felt) into a place that seemed to be a wall and certain death but was an alley, as I saw, though Giselle didn’t, and she chose to scream.

“Let me out!” she yelled, and I slowed the car.

“Are you bored?” I asked.

“I find death boring. Why should I die because my husband wants to? I find it boring.”

“You certainly have style, Giselle, to think about death when we’re out for a joy ride.”

I reached behind the driver’s seat and found a small package, then deftly, with one hand, unwrapped it to reveal four bratwurst afloat in mustard, and I offered the mess to Giselle. She set it on her lap and I then found my bag of Brötchen, and while holding the steering wheel with my knee, I split a Brötchen, stuffed a bratwurst into its crevice, hot-dog style, and handed it to her.

“Is this today food?” she asked.

“As I recall.”

“How long since you bought this?”

“Time means nothing to me.”

“It means everything to bratwurst.”

“Trust me.”

“Are you in your right mind?”

“No, nor have I ever been. My life is a tissue of delirious memory.”

“What do you remember?”

“Peculiar things. The Captain’s hypocritical face when we met at MP headquarters after my arrest. The smell of my father’s whiskey-and-tobacco breath when I was twelve. The desire to raise a handlebar mustache like my father’s. The spasms of bliss that always punctuate the onset of love with you. Why do you ask?”

“I was curious about your saintly incestuous father.”

“Did I speak of my saintly incestuous father?”

“You did.”

“I can’t account for it. May I take off your clothing?”

“It remains to be seen.”

“I would stop the car, of course.”

“That would improve our chances of not dying a hideous death.”

I stopped the car and went for the back of her neck, running one hand under her hair and with the other seeking blouse burtons. She pushed me away and got out and I instantly broke into a fit of sobbing. The sobs choked me, my body twisted, my face fell into the bratwurst, and I made the noises a man makes when he knows that the sorrows of the world are his alone.

Giselle came round to my side of the car and opened my door, tugged me up and out. I stopped sobbing, rubbed the mustard off my face, and she and I walked together on strange streets, she silent, I smiling with what came to be known as my zombie joy. Giselle didn’t know where to take me. I’d been a fugitive now for two days and she feared premature contact with the military. My wounds, though not serious to look at, were a problem; for she envisioned the Military Police ignoring them and throwing me into a cell where I’d molder in my zombie coma, oblivious to the venomous impact my own morbid bites might be having on my body.

“You bit yourself, Orson,” she said to me.

“Bit yourself,” I said.

“Our mouths are full of poison,” she said.

“Yes. Pyorrhea. Gingivitis.”

“What if you bit your own hand and infused the pyorrhea into your fingers?”

The thought gave me pause. I stopped walking and looked at my hand.

“Pestilential saliva,” I said.

“Exactly.”

“Bronchial methanes, colonic phosgenes. Can they become agents of involuntary suicide?”

“I think you’re getting the idea,” she said.

The perception raised my spirits and Giselle decided to call Quinn, who would be getting ready for reveille, the sun now breaking through the final moments of the night. Quinn had access to a Jeep and had contacts with German newspapermen who would know where to get me treated. I liked Quinn and trusted him, which certainly proves something. I didn’t know he’d been in love with Giselle since the night she performed on the high stool at the Christmas party. Quinn went to dinner with us now and again and I saw that Giselle found him appealingly innocent.

Quinn did know a doctor, an ex-medical officer in the Wehrmacht who had a small general practice in the suburb of Bonames. He treated my five bite wounds and then we went back to our apartment, where Giselle bathed me, washed the pomade out of my hair, and dressed me in my uniform so I would surrender as a soldier, not a madman. I was contrite at the surrender, but in a moment of messianic candor I told the officer of the day I had been to hell and back and was now prepared to redeem the world’s sins, including his.

They put me in tight security and limited my visitors to Giselle and an army psychiatrist, Dr. Tannen, who saw the condition I was in and transferred me to an army hospital. It became clear I was not fit to stand court martial.

“The man seems to have had a psychotic episode, but I would not say he’s psychotic,” the doctor told Giselle in my presence, as if I didn’t exist. “He is living in the very real world of his second self, where there is always an answer to every riddle. He believes he is a bastard, an unwanted child. He was seriously neglected by mother and father, though he exudes love for them both. He is so insecure that he requires a façade to reduce his anxieties to manageable size; and so every waking moment is an exercise in mendacity, including self-delusion. He has found no career direction, and has completed nothing of significance to himself. He left the publishing world, rejects teaching and journalism, loathes the army, and rues the inertia that allowed him to be called back to active duty. He sees nothing worth doing, including completing the last contorted sentence of his unfinished book, which now ends on a high note of suspense with a comma. He is a man for whom money means nothing, but who has wrapped himself inside a cocoon of such hubris that he centers his life at the apex of the haut monde, as he calls it, a world for which there is no equivalent in reality, at least not without much more money than he possesses. Seated beside him at this apex is you, my dear, his goddess of the unattainable moon. He never quite believes you are really his wife, and so, when he reaches out to impose love upon you and you push him away, his moon explodes, and he drops into near catatonia, his so-called zombie condition.”

I nodded my agreement, which amused Giselle and also the doctor, who continued: “To finance his life with you in the haut monde, he thrust himself into the petty criminality that now threatens his freedom. Further, after his arrest, and being simultaneously abandoned by his mentor in corruption, Meister Geld, a man about whom he knows almost nothing, he is once again the bereft bastard, without parent, without salvation. He is the unredeemable, loathsome, fear-ridden orphan of the storm, living in the shadow of an achieved father, crippled, he thinks, by the genes of unknown ancestors, and now with a future that holds only degradation, possibly of a lifelong order. And so he descended into a neurotic abyss, and resurrected from it in the guise of a blasphemous new Jesus, the only saviour available in this profane world he now inhabits. The army would be as mad as he is to put him on trial in this condition.”

The army, citing my illness and my sterling war record, moved me toward a medical discharge. Dr. Tannen also announced that his tour of army duty was at an end, and that he was returning to private practice in Manhattan. This news plunged me into a new depression.

As I slowly came out of it, I was released from the hospital, and at the sunny lunch hour of the third day I told Giselle I wanted to go to the Künstler Klause to dance. It was the first time I’d expressed interest in doing anything since my collapse. The dismissal of the charges buoyed my spirit, but the impending loss of my therapist weighed on me. Giselle asked him if he would take me as a patient back in Manhattan, and he said of course. She then made the private decision to send me home alone.

Eva the belly dancer was one of the Künstler Klause’s attractions, along with a magician and a four-piece band — trumpet, drums, violin, and accordion. The club was cheap glitz with a marine decor. Fishnets adorned with anchors, marlin, and mermaids formed the backdrop for the small stage and modest dance floor. The waiter lit the table candle when we sat down, and as we listened to the music I became intensely happy. The club’s crowd was mostly Germans, with a few GIs. Quinn came in while the band played.

“I didn’t know you were coming,” I said to him.

“I asked him,” Giselle said. “I thought we’d celebrate your first night out.”

“That’s a fine idea,” I said.

“I’d like some wine,” Quinn said to the waiter. “Moselle.”

“Moselle all around,” I said and I took a fifty-mark note out of my pocket.

“Put your money away,” Quinn said.

Quinn looked very young. He had large even teeth and a handsome, crooked smile that gave him a knowing look.

“I saved the good news for our party,” Giselle said.

“What good news?” I asked.

“Quinn started it,” she said. “He sent my photographs to Paris Match and they bought them. Isn’t that something?”

“That’s quite something,” I said. “What photographs?”

“The photos of you at Fritz’s Garden, you and all those freaks. The editors said they hadn’t seen anything like this out of Germany since the early thirties. Isn’t that remarkable?”

“Photos of me?” I said.

“No one could recognize you,” she said. “You were biting yourself. Paris Match is using four pictures and they have an assignment for me in Berlin.”

I said nothing.

“I did very little,” Quinn said. “I just put her in touch with the editors. The pictures sold themselves. Not only that, the magazine’s art director knew Giselle’s mother very well.”

“She knew everybody in art,” Giselle said.

“So Giselle comes by her talent naturally,” Quinn said.

“She’s a natural, all right,” I said, and I heard that my voice had gone flat.

Eva the belly dancer came on, dancing close to the ringside tables so men could stuff money into her belt, which rode well below the belly

“I remember her,” I said when I saw Eva. “People insulted her at the Christmas party.” I took my fifty marks out of my pocket again and tucked it into Eva’s belt, just under the navel.

“Orson,” Giselle said, grabbing the bill as Eva spun away from us, “you can’t afford to give money away.”

“We have to pay for insulting the girl.”

“I already paid,” Giselle said. “Remember?”

“Ah,” I said.

“I remember,” said Quinn.

We didn’t speak until Eva had finished her dance and the magician came on. He gave his patter in German and then did a few simple tricks with handkerchiefs and flowers. Boring. He lit a cigarette and made it disappear to his left, then picked it out of his right pocket, smoked it, threw it, lit, from hand to hand, and smoked it again.

“That’s a fake cigarette,” I said. “It’s not lit. Watch what he does with it.”

The magician put the cigarette inside his shirt collar, against his neck.

“He gets rid of the real cigarette right away and holds its smoke in his mouth to use for the fake one,” I explained.

“You know all the tricks,” Giselle said.

The magician had relaxed me and I asked Giselle to dance. We danced well, like old times.

“I’m sorry I’m sick,” I said.

“You’re not sick. Things just got to be too much.”

“I’ll come out of it.”

“Dr. Tannen thinks he can help you. He said he’d continue treating you.”

“How? By mail?”

“You could go to New York.”

“I could.”

“Yes, you.”

“Not you?”

“One of us has to work. I’ve got another six months in my contract with the government. And now there’s the photo assignment in Berlin, and I really want that.”

“So. You go your way, I’ll go mine.”

“Wrong, wrong, wrong. I’ll come to New York to stay in six months’ time.”

I let my arm fall and walked back to the table and drank my wine. “I have no place to live in New York,” I said.

“I called your father yesterday and again this morning. He has space in his apartment. He also called your old publisher and they’ll give you free-lance editing work.”

That widened my smile. “My father,” I said. “My father, my father, my father. I could sleep on my father’s couch anytime. I could sleep on his couch or I could sleep in his bathtub, in his sink. He’d give me his bed, two beds. Two beds and a couch. Three beds, two tubs, and six couches. Take your choice, boy, the sky’s the limit, anything you want. Dad. My dad. Symbiotic, that’s what we are. He’s the symbi, I’m the otic, together we’re a great team. It’s just like this place, look around you. Ever see a more homey, more beautiful place? Look at those fishnets, listen to that music, straight from the angels, straight from the fish. And Eva, what a beauty. I thinks she wants to fuck me. Why don’t we go back and tell her it’s okay? She’s such a sweetheart, nobody like her in Germany. Like my mother, a great dancer. Like my father, a great dancer. Dance is the thing, the ticket, the flow, the flood. Dance is manse and pants and ants in your prance. High kicking, watch those shanks and pasterns, folks, watch those hocks and fetlocks. Nothing like mothers and fathers dancing together, nothing like fucking beautiful women who love you and dance so well while they’re doing it, wishing it, wishing will make it so, wish you were here, it is true if you think it is, true love, it’s true, it’s blue, it’s you, it’s moo moo mulieribus in aeternitatem, ein Prosit, ein Prosit, Herr Ober, more Moselle, more Moselle, more Moselle. .”

And on I went until Giselle leaned over and kissed me with her Judas kiss. Then she and Quinn took me home. Dr. Tannen came the next afternoon and the way to New York was arranged, the charges against me buried in the army’s dead-case file, my troop ship awaiting. Quinn and Giselle took the train with me to Bremerhaven and we had a fine time while I said my farewells to Germany. We ate in the first-class dining car, ordered champagne to toast our reunion in six months, and the beginning of our new lives. I put Quinn in charge of Giselle, told him to report anyone who tried to move in on her while I was away. Quinn and I shook hands on it. On the way back to Frankfurt I have no doubt that Quinn, being in charge of Giselle, bought a first-class sleeper for their trip.