Crackpot, page 30
If the man did not choose to defend himself there must be at least something in the accusation. What did he mean by “exaggeration”? “Not with a whole hand?” as Uncle quipped. Or had a fatherly caress on the part of a lonely man become exaggerated in the telling? “God knows,” one of the old guard became quite emotional on Limprig’s behalf, “it’s not difficult sometimes to misconstrue a fatherly caress.”
It was at this point, when the baffled board members were grumbling back and forth at each other, because the man himself was putting them in a position where they had to accept his resignation and disrupt a setup which had been their pride for years, that Uncle Nate offered to talk to Limprig and see what he could do toward clarifying the situation. Limprig was summoned to his own office, and with the rest of the board waiting in the library, and the intervening doors carefully closed, he was interviewed by Uncle Nate.
“See here, Limprig,” said Uncle bluntly. “I don’t know if you were fiddling with the kids here or not. Never mind!” He held up his hand and waved away Limprig’s nervous gesture. “I don’t care, one little girl, two; you’ve felt one, you’ve felt them all, if you’re going to get yourself caught, if not today, tomorrow. You go in for that kind of thing you might as well have a party.”
“No,” Limprig began. “No honestly, I just…” and he made a despairing little gesture with his hand.
“Limprig, I say, put down the finger! I don’t want to know how!” Even Uncle was a little embarrassed by the helpless little gesture. “We know,” he added hastily, “you’re a good man. Like I say we’ve never had any complaints; till now we’ve been satisfied. I for one feel it would be a shame to lose a man like you. When I know you’re in charge I don’t have to worry my head the place isn’t being run right, see?”
Limprig nodded, accepted, perforce, the right of the board to select this most uncouth of its members to treat with him.
“But we can’t have any scandal,” Nate continued reasonably. “We can’t have fathers in here all the time threatening to call the police because you…” Here Uncle couldn’t resist the desire to repeat Limprig’s repellent but fascinating little gesture.
Limprig, who had not at all intended for his gesture to be illustrative, uttered a curious little moan, and looked away. “I’ve resigned,” he said desperately. “You have my letter of resignation.”
“Yes,” said Uncle. “I know. And I don’t mind telling you between you and me it won’t be so easy to replace you. Listen, Limprig, we’re civilized people here. How many good administrators have we got? I myself don’t believe in wasting a good man. You’ve got a little problem, the way I look at it, it doesn’t have to mean the end of the world. Put you where your problem doesn’t interfere and you’ll still be a good administrator, right? Well then, I’ll tell you what. I’ve got a little proposition I want to make to you. Maybe you noticed last month my picture in the Yiddish paper? Happens they just elected me chairman of the board at the Old Folks’ Home. You know we’ve got a building program going on. They said ‘Nate, at this time we need you!’ Oh it’s coming to me that chairman’s seat. I’ve worked. Plenty of time, plenty of money I spent.”
“Congratulations,” murmured Limprig faintly.
“Thanks. I suppose you’re surprised I should be talking to you before the rest of them? I’ll tell you straight. It happens, we need a good man to put the Old Folks’ Home in order, a man like you in fact. So how about it? Resign here, okay, like you did, but make it like a transfer to our place. That way, people won’t wonder why all of a sudden you’re resigning and running away someplace. We won’t have any scandal. You’ll still have a job, and if you want to tickle an old lady sometimes, there it won’t be a sin, it’ll be a good deed, a real mitzvah. So what do you say, Limprig, how about it? I’m chairman. My word goes. If I want you, you’re in. Believe me, you’ll solve all your problems. When you walk through these doors to face the boys, you’ll be a man with a job.” For all his grossness, Uncle knew where some of the finer nerve endings are located. Shortly afterwards, Limprig’s hesitations swept aside, the two of them passed through the file room, and with a gesture, Uncle Nate flung open the library door. “Gentlemen,” he announced, with a flourish of his cigar, “I want you to meet the new Director of the Old Folks’ Home.”
There were enough members of the board capable of a humorous appreciation of the admirable symmetry of Uncle’s solution to congratulate him on being sly enough to turn their loss into a gain for the Old Folks’ Home. Only a few were heard to mutter that Uncle might just as easily have presented his proposal to the board, which would have given its blessing perforce, instead of turning the occasion into a dramatic little coup. But they were unfair to suggest the old thief had set up his “steal” because he didn’t know any but the crooked way of doing things, even when there was no need. Uncle wasn’t even thinking of pulling a fast one. He acted in response to an inner sense of dramatic fitness in setting up his little scene. And what, after all, had anybody to complain about? Surprise dispelled their embarrassment in confronting Limprig face to face, most of them for the first time since the problem arose, and now instead of dwelling on what they would all rather forget, they were able, thanks to Uncle, to enter, with Limprig, into a calm discussion of the details of his relinquishment of office, and arrange for all to be carried out in satisfactory order. “Like they told me,” Nate could not resist adding the imaginary compliment the board should have paid him, when he was telling his story to Hoda and her father, “Nate,” they said, “You’re a Solomon. A Solomon,” Nate repeated, moved, and gazed with visionary intensity at the tip of his cigar.
But people don’t appreciate. Nate was to discover very shortly once again that the world is unworthy of its Solomons. On the morning of the day that the Limprigs were to move to their new residence, Naomi Limprig, neatly dressed and wearing her mother’s pearls, was found hanging in the file room, the same closet through which Uncle Nate had led her husband from despair to a new life. Uncle was not even the first to be called to the scene. He was on time, however, summoned by the murmuring undertow which drags people to the scene of disaster, to elbow his way through the little crowd and stride up the drive, the only board member to actually see the suffering in that grotesque, frozen face and be enveloped by the nimbus of horror which temporarily changed even him. Standing there, hanging on to the newel post, after the policeman had taken him firmly by the elbow and led him, still identifying himself, but now apologetically, from the library into which he had burst in the pride of his self-importance, Uncle wondered, though with uncommon diffidence, how he could best assert himself in this situation. Looking up, he caught a glimpse of Limprig, just turning back from the top of the stairs, and realized the man must have been on his way down, and had turned back in order to avoid him. For once the impulse shrivelled in Nate, to summon him peremptorily down. He was too stunned by the intensity, the savagery of grief in the face that had been quickly wrenched from his view.
Nor could Uncle take better hold when he found his way finally to the cot in the sick bay where Mrs. Tize half-sat, half-lay across the sedated but still restless child who clung to her, while she tried to soothe him with stilted words of unaccustomed tenderness. Uncle wanted to let her know that he too had seen, that he too needed comforting. But Mrs. Tize knew her place. Still stroking the muttering child, she gave a terse, low-voiced report, while Uncle listened with head thrust forward, because her accent seemed to have become more pronounced, and rested his eyes on her left breast, which lay like a cat on the counterpane.
Thus Uncle learned that Mrs. Limprig must have taken a long time to expire, and that she must still have been twitching when the little boy who came to the library to greet her every morning heard the thumping of her foot against the library wall, and opened the closet door. Summoned by his screams, Mrs. Tize had arrived to find an insane tug-of-war going on between Pipick who was hanging onto her legs and trying to pull Naomi Limprig down to the ground, and Limprig, just arrived, who was trying to raise and support the body. Ruth Tize had wrestled the child away and dragged him out, still screaming “Mamma,” though she tried to muffle his screams against her breast. Remembering, she wept, and her very sobs had an aristocratic, hard-to-come-by sound to Nate. In his masculine innocence responding sexually to her distress, he asked with gruff tenderness what he could do to help, to which Mrs. Tize, somewhat removed from the impulse which responds to disaster with the urge to new life, and resenting, too, momentarily, the proprietary interest of the gods in human sorrow, replied somewhat tartly, “Oh, call a board meeting.”
“Poo wa lie dee, poowaladdee,” he thought he heard her whispering to herself as he left.
“They’re all crazy,” he told Gusia plaintively afterwards, and not until she had replied, with her infallible instinct for saying what he did not want to hear, “So who told you to get mixed up with them in the first place?” was the knot inside of him released and swept away in a cleansing rage. But there are residues of feeling that simply cannot be yelled away, meaningless details that reverberate unphrasable questions. Uncle took his uneasiness to his poor relations, and tried to unburden himself of what he had seen. But as soon as Hoda realized that he was actually going to imitate the face of the strangled Mrs. Limprig, she jumped up and turned away from him, yelling, “I’m not looking! I’m not going to look! Uncle, I’m not looking!” And Nate was left hanging his tongue out and goggling his eyes in the face of a blind man. And not only that, the stupid cow refused to turn around again until he had assured her at least ten times that he wasn’t doing it any more. Uncle was frustrated. He had been upstaged every time he put his foot on the boards lately. He sulked, but Hoda was too distracted to notice. She was terrified that he might yet spring Mrs. Limprig’s death mask on her, and if that happened she didn’t know what would come bursting over her. Was the punishment for wanting to know too much that you got your wish? Something reckless and crazy in her kept rearing up and saying, All right, show me uncle, show me! But she bit her tongue back and watched, ready to whirl away the minute he should try it again.
Uncle sought Danile’s sympathetic ear, to which he found himself confiding even his disappointment in Limprig, who had turned his face from him, “As if I was an enemy. Did I do him any harm?”
“Oh, no!” cried Danile, and he described for Uncle how a man in the bitterness of his grief will turn inward and eat his own entrails.
Uncle was soothed, not so much by the sense of Danile’s words, for he scarcely listened, as by the ardent sympathy in the sound of them. It occurred to him that he had always had bad luck with cripples, particularly female cripples. But he refrained from voicing this complaint, and instead came to the decision, even as he was sitting there, that he would forbear from recrimination, and would let Limprig know, at the appropriate time, that his job at the Old Folks’ Home was still waiting for him whenever he was ready to take up his duties. He interrupted Danile to tell him this, and sat back, much comforted by his own magnanimity, nodding agreement as his nephew praised his compassion and applauded his wisdom.
After that Uncle seemed to lose much of his interest in the affairs of the orphanage. He was not impressed by the new Director, for all that he was a local man and a family man and his life was an open book. It was not a very well-kept book, was Uncle’s point, but normality was the cry among board members now, and Mr. Popoff ’s promise, that moving his large family right into the orphanage would have the natural effect of turning the whole home into one big, happy family, swept aside Uncle’s objections that in past community service Popoff had proved himself to be but an indifferent administrator. Uncle gave way with unwonted mildness when he was overridden, and turned his attention elsewhere. Henceforth he contented himself with only token attendance at board meetings, where he nevertheless made something of a nuisance of himself by grunting irrepressibly at each new proof that he had been right about Popoff from the start, sighing heavily through the Director’s prolix and circumlocutory reports, rumbling ominously to indicate disapproval of some proposed decision, and groaning outright at times for no immediately traceable reason. All of this made some of the members quite uneasy, but when he was asked to give an opinion, Uncle now invariably replied, “I’m not talking,” or alternately, “I’m quiet, I’m still.”
Hoda no longer tried to coax Uncle Nate to elaborate imitations. She would not again try to affiliate herself intensely and secretly with the orphanage staff. You didn’t know what you were hooking yourself onto. She felt at one and the same time that she had had some kind of narrow escape, and that she had failed once again in some unspecified area that she could not bring herself to try to examine. One thing was sure, Mrs. Limprig’s way was out; a fat lot of good you would ever be able to be to the boy someday if, when he needed you, you were hanging there. No, Hoda would continue to keep tabs, but from a distance, and await her time. She found some comfort in the new theory of the happy Popoff family, despite Uncle’s patent lack of enthusiasm. All she wanted, after all, for the time being, was that the kid should be brought up in a happy family.
Uncle, who missed the old enthusiasm over his imitations, and put himself out now to bring forth the hearty guffaw, nevertheless held his ground when she argued the merits of the Popoff method with him. “Limprig was a better director than Popoff with his hands tied behind his back,” he insisted. “Maybe we should have kept them tied there,” he added, and won his laugh from Hoda.
Of course she continued to look forward to his visits, but the prospect of a visit from Uncle Nate was no longer able to fortify her, even temporarily, against her own craziness. She was still periodically assaulted by the urge to flight, which she resisted only by wrapping herself around her pillow and lying there, haunted by the spectre of herself running, sucked by invisible forces through the dark streets. Some time was to pass yet before she learned to deal with the fits of craziness in their own language.
NINE
You’d think that in all the years since she’d been making her visits to the City Hall, Hoda would have lost the feeling of uneasiness with which she approached the place each time. Not so. Even though she joked with her customers about it, and reassured them often enough about what she called “my connections at City Hall,” because it was good policy to let them know they were safe with her, and even though she brazened it out by being her most aggressively rambunctious self while she was visiting her “connections,” her stomach didn’t stop turning over and over until she was safely out of there again.
Maybe that was why she always walked, even in winter, though it was quite far, not only because she saved carfare but because by walking she could get some of the pleasures of delay out of all the familiar sights and feelings and pauses along the way, and almost forget where she was going. The very normality of the scenes she passed might lead, by sympathetic magic, to the right kind of conclusion to her errand. In spite of her discomfort, she went more often than she intended to, more often, certainly, than they wanted her up there, as they made clear. Well, that was just too bad, whatever they thought. She was a citizen and she had her rights and they ought to be glad she had a sense of responsibility. Did they think she enjoyed coming and seeing their supercilious faces and being treated at fingertips’ end like an overfull specimen bottle? She came because she had to, because sometimes she awoke in fear that something had gone wrong, and when she felt like that she didn’t care any more that she would have to face that “Oh my Lord look who’s here again” expression on their faces. She had never liked their attitude, and she still didn’t like their attitude, but she could cope with it all right. Just let them tend to their part of the business, and let everything be all right this once more; that’s what she was thinking all the time inside of herself, even when, in the early days, she was putting on the noisy routine that she had discovered would embarrass them into seeing to her business promptly instead of keeping her waiting for hours as they used to do at first, though she always got there early and sometimes even arrived before they’d opened up.
It was two or three miles up Main Street before you reached the City Hall. On the way she could see what shops had been forced to close down since last time, and peer in on their dirty, empty insides, and try to remember what they’d been like just a little while before. And she could stop and discuss the depression with old acquaintances in the Farmer’s Market, where the peddlers and farmers were just beginning to unload. Sometimes, on an impulse, because of that sixth sense she had developed for business, she’d detour behind the Farmer’s Market past some of the wholesalers, where the wagons were loading, and if she was lucky she’d maybe do some business with the energetic young teamsters. A couple of times, in one place, she had been briefly with the big boss himself, though the honour didn’t really impress Hoda, since he didn’t pay any more, or in any other way distinguish himself from anyone else by showing special interest in her. She just didn’t have Hymie’s luck.
What with her detours and stops to chat, by the time she moved beyond the market area into the Main Street again, the merchants were arriving and opening up the little dry goods and dresswear and secondhand shops, and the chip and vinegar stands were open for people to grab an early cup of coffee. Hoda scrutinized carefully, with as much fascination as she had felt for the stuff in the fifteen-cent store windows when she was a kid, the elegant items that were laid out one almost on top of the other behind the metal screens of the pawnshop windows, good-quality stuff, really cheap if you could afford it, and really classy if you could use it; jewellery and watches and all those musical instruments that Hoda felt she could have learned to play when she was a kid, that Ma and Pa used to talk of getting her someday when they could afford one, like a violin, so she would have been a great musician. If it happened to be spring she looked out for the crude glamour of a new fly-by-night gypsy fortune-teller’s window, mysterious signs boldly drawn, significant objects, discreet and faintly sinister folds of dark curtain. It was pretty cheesy when you stopped to look at it close up, like at the circus, but still they might know something. Funny how you never hear people wishing fortune-tellers good luck, though they go to them greedy for good fortune. Sometimes she thought of doing a little fortune-telling herself as a sideline, to liven up her business. After the main course maybe: “Say, mister, while you’re here, how would you like me to tell your fortune?” No, not unless she could learn to be more careful when she opened her mouth. You learned a lot about guys in her business, but not much that they wanted you to tell them about afterwards. “I see a big future for you mister, six-eightten inches maybe.” What else, for Hoda?
