The Feather Merchants Page 5

“In previous years I used to stare at these girls and think my thoughts, and when I reached the boiling point, as it were, I went to an understanding trollop who served me at these times. I never resented the indifference of the coeds, their obliviousness to my feelings. To be sure, I concealed my feelings, for I am a man of dignity. But nonetheless, when a younger man lusted after one of these young women, no matter how well he disguised his passion, she always was aware of it and acted accordingly. But I—when I saw them rolling a stocking or settling a twisted breast in its harness (braziers, I believe they are called), they would proceed with their task as unhurriedly as though a glimpse of thigh or mammae had no more effect on me than on a hall tree.

  “But, as I say, I did not resent that. I am a teacher to whose care the young are entrusted for learning. I considered it an oblique tribute to my excellence as a teacher that these young women did not think of me as a man. Nevertheless, I was gratified at first when I became one of the few remaining men on the campus and cognizance was taken of my gender at last. Now when I see them rolling a stocking they hoist their skirts down with alacrity. But now they roll their stockings whenever they think I’m looking.

  “At first, I say, I was gratified. But soon it became disconcerting. I have neither the money nor the strength to make all the visits to my friend that I have felt the need for in recent months. And to make advances to a student is unthinkable. Caught between the Scylla of excitement and the Charybdis of age plus a fixed income, I am going to pot.

  “I have offered my services to the Army, but they informed me that the demand for experts in Byzantine architecture is slack at this time and that no boom is anticipated.”

  He stopped in front of a lecture hall.

  “Now,” he said, “I am going to give a lecture. There is one man in my class, a frail youth whose health precludes military service. God grant that he is well enough to be here today so that I may fasten my eyes on him and thus be able to deliver my lecture. I cannot stand much more of breast and leg and hot, mascaraed eyes. Good-by, young man. Buy bonds.”

  He turned into the lecture hall and I continued my circuit of the campus, sighing softly, “Ichabod. The glory has departed.”

  CHAPTER NINE

  I was in front of the Red Cross office at precisely five-thirty. She was just coming out the door. My heart slipped into a Cheyne-Stokes routine. I did not try to conceal my satisfaction as I watched her walk across the sidewalk to the car. In ten years a Lane Bryant customer without a doubt, but now—five feet three, 125 pounds, black hair, blue eyes, small nose, small mouth, pointed chin, milk-white skin, high, disassociated breasts, narrow waist, a pelvis that could accommodate a pair of water jugs, full-calved legs which filled her Nylons so completely that if you tried to gather a pinch of stocking between thumb and forefinger you would fail, narrow ankles, size 4-AAA shoes. She was wearing a small, dark, veiled hat cocked low over one eye, a dark blue silk dress which billowed demurely where it didn’t matter, clung brazenly where it did.

  “You look wonderful,” I said with the whole heart.

  She got into the car. If I had thawed her over the phone in the morning, she was frozen again now. “I tried to call you to break this date, but you weren’t home. I think it would have been better if we hadn’t seen each other tonight,” she said.

  “Nonsense,” I protested. “We’re a couple of civilized, intelligent people. We can say our good-bys properly.”

  “Well, just dinner then. After that you’ll take me right home?”

  “As you say. You’re looking lovely, Estherlee.”

  “Thank you. You’ve lost weight.”

  “Oh, have I? My mother says I’ve gotten hog-fat. She’s put me on a skim-milk diet.”

  We spoke carefully of trivial things as I drove out to the Longhorn, a suburban steak house of poignant associations. “Our place,” we had always called it. Actually it was owned by two lowbred Slovenes named Hrdlicka and Czyncz who freely practiced wife trading and whose numerous offspring presented vexing problems in paternity. In fact, one boy, Basil, was the child of neither. His father was a somnambulist named Harris who wandered one night from his next-door lodgings into the bedchamber of Mrs. Czyncz. She, thinking it was Czyncz or Hrdlicka, made no commotion.

  There are those who say that Harris wasn’t sleeping.

  The Longhorn had been the scene of our first kiss. It happened one evening when we were double-dating with my friend Sam Wye. At this time I had been going with Estherlee a couple of months, but I had held myself in check because I had been warned that she had Puritan tendencies and I didn’t want to lose a girl whose dimensions so delighted my middle-European tastes by making premature advances. We were sitting in the Longhorn eating steak, the four of us. Somewhere Sam Wye had picked up a girl with a cleft palate and he was telling her harelip jokes. (A mischievous character, Sam Wye. Last I heard, he was in an engineers’ battalion. I was happy to learn that he was on our side.) After a while Sam got tired of baiting his girl and turned to Estherlee. “The trouble with you,” he said, “is that you’re frigid.”

  “What?”

  “Frigid. A lady eunuch. You’ll probably turn into an elecdrip.”

  “A what?”

  “An elecdrip. A drip who goes around parking places at night shining spotlights into parked cars. You might even become a policewoman.”

  That stung her. “Frigid, am I?” she said. “Do you call this frigid?”

  Whereupon she kissed me full on my sirloin-filled mouth. From then on it was easy.

  After that we came to the Longhorn often. It was at the Longhorn that we made our final decision on my last night at home. Leaving our steaks half finished, we drove to near-by Lake Echo, where on the grassy shores of a dark inlet I ruined her life.

  I parked the car in front of the Longhorn and we went in. I steered her to a dark corner booth that had been our favorite. A waiter laid menus on the table. The menu was unchanged from the last time I had seen it except for doubled prices and these two notices penciled on the bottom by Hrdlicka, the partner who could write: “ON ACCOUNT OF THE DURATION, YOU ONLY GET ONE PAT BUTTER” and “DON’T GET SO HUFFY IF THE SERVICE IS SLOW. HOW DO YOU KNOW MAYBE YOUR WAITER GAVE A QUART BLOOD THIS AFTERNOON?” We ordered the house’s special, filet mignon Hrdlicka et Czyncz.

  During dinner I did not speak, not wishing to interrupt the flow of memories that I hoped the Longhorn was awakening in Estherlee’s mind. She, too, was silent, which I held to be a good sign. After dinner we lit cigarettes and I blew smoke rings, an accomplishment that in the past had never failed to delight her. Still unspeaking, I paid the check and we went out to the car.

  With confidence in the mnemonic effects of the Longhorn, I boldly swung the car toward Lake Echo. “Dan,” Estherlee, that fox, said, “you are driving to Lake Echo. You promised to take me home right after dinner.”

  “I just thought we could talk for a few minutes.”

  “Please take me home.”

  “But it’s so early. Can’t we go someplace for a little while?”

  “We have nothing to talk about. I want to go home this minute.”

  “Aw, Estherlee.”

  “I’m sorry I ever consented to this date, although, to be sure, I have no recollection of so doing. I don’t believe you intended to say good-by at all tonight. If you think you can talk me out of anything, you’re wasting your time and mine. My mind is made up. I am trying to be civil and not bring up painful matters. Now you will please take me home.”

  “We could go someplace and dance.”

  “No.”

  “Canoeing.”

  “No. Turn the car around and take me home.”

  I saw the lights of a movie theater a block ahead. “The point is,” I said, “that you don’t want to have any conversation with me this evening.”

  “Exactly.”

  “We couldn’t very well talk at a movie, could we?”

  “No, but—”

  We were in front of the
theater. I quickly pulled into a parking space. “All right,” I said, applying Judo and escorting her from the car. “Come on.” I had her prudently wedged in the center of a crowded row before she could protest. “Dan!” she said.

  “Shh,” said a man beside her.

  She leaned back sullenly in her seat. The newsreel was on. First there were pictures of a jeep demonstration during which the versatile little vehicle climbed up a perpendicular cliff, forded a stream twenty feet deep, and finally, driverless, smashed into the jungle and rounded up one hundred and twenty Jap prisoners.

  Then there was a representation of a recent air battle. The newsreel commentator said with perfect frankness that no actual pictures of the battle were obtained, but that the scenes to follow would give the audience a superb conception of what took place during the battle. There followed a sequence from Hell’s Angels, with Spads and Fokkers chasing each other the hell all over the sky, pilots getting shot and immediately releasing a neat trickle of chocolate syrup from the corners of their mouths, the same plane being shot down in flames three times, and occasional glimpses of the late Jean Harlow where the film editor had been careless.

  Finally came the cheesecake, this time a scene of Hollywood starlets (by coincidence, all under contract to the company which produced the newsreel) who were having the names of their favorite soldiers tattooed on their upper thighs. One, who was being groomed for speaking roles, explained demurely, “When Hymie comes marching home, I want him to see that I’ve been thinking of him.”

  Next the feature came on. It was a war epic entitled Murder the Bastards. Because of the patriotic nature of its subject, the Hays office had blinked the title. Its stars were Omar Beasley, a decaying juvenile originally brought to Hollywood by David Wark Griffith, and, in her first American role, the sensational foreign discovery, Philomene Noodnik, who for years had played the lead in the annual Sofia drama festival, a week-long cycle of tableaux depicting the discovery of buttermilk by Hunrath the Bald, a twelfth-century Bulgar princeling. When her country fell into the Axis orbit Philomene escaped to Lisbon disguised as a clothes hamper. She was fortunately able to book passage to America on the Clipper. She learned English on the flight across from a friendly co-pilot named Ralph. He did not give his last name.

  As Murder the Bastards opens, a Flying Fortress is winging over the Pacific. Inside is the crew, Omar at the pilot’s seat. The crew is making small talk over the interphones. Everyone is relaxed except Ed, the waist gunner, who keeps saying he’s too young to die. The navigator takes a reading and announces, “Ten minutes from target.”

  “Take over,” says Omar to the co-pilot, and goes back to give his crew a final check. He says a few encouraging words and pats each man on the shoulder. Each replies with a confident smile, save Ed, who falls to the floor kicking and screaming. Omar goes into the back end of the fuselage to inspect the wiring and is astonished to see a woman half hidden behind an oxygen tank. She is Philomene, a half-caste with whom Omar has been trifling back at the air base. “You!” he cries. “What are you doing here?”

  “I make sky-tiffin for you,” she says, writhing sinuously at his feet.

  “Good heavens,” says Omar, “you can’t stay here. This is no place for a woman.”

  “I don’t be much bother,” she pleads. “I sweep up a leetle, keep the jernt nice and clean.”

  The navigator breaks into Omar’s dilemma. “One minute from target.”

  “Two minutes ago you said ten minutes from target,” Omar says testily.

  “So I made a mistake,” says the navigator. “Whatsa matter, you never made a mistake?”

  Omar rashes to his seat just in time to pilot the plane over a Jap supply dump. The bombs are dropped and all hit squarely. In a minute the sky is filled with Jap fighter planes. They seem to be using Spads and Fokkers. There is an occasional glimpse of Jean Harlow. Inside the Fortress the crew has manned machine guns. Every thirty seconds one of them yells, “I got the bastard!” and there is a shot of the same plane going down in flames. Ed, his mouth working, makes an attempt at handling his gun but gives up in a few minutes and falls down whimpering, “I’m scared, I tell you, scared.” Philomene takes over his gun and soon shouts happily, “I got, how you say, the bastard!”

  But the Fortress is no match for all the enemy Spads and Fokkers. The fuselage is ripped with bullets, the wings are perforated, and one by one each motor is shot out. “Prepare for crash landing,” says Omar. He doesn’t know it yet, but everyone else except Ed and Philomene has been killed. He brings the plane down in a fortunately placed meadow in the middle of a jungle.

  The three survivors wander for days in the jungle, Philomene making scant tiffin of grubs and wild berries. Ed’s nerves, although it seems hardly possible, get even worse. One afternoon he loses control completely and begins screaming at the top of his lungs. “Quiet, you fool,” says Omar. “Do you want to bring every Jap in the jungle down on us?”

  Maybe Ed didn’t want to, but the next minute the Japs are all around them and trundle them off to headquarters.

  Inside headquarters sits the Jap colonel, played by Sidney Fatstreet, eating grapes off the tip of a dagger. “Aha,” says Sidney. “Still trying to thwart the Japanese Empire, I see.”

  “Oh yeah,” says Omar.

  “When will you democratic fools learn that your system of government is decadent?”

  “Oh yeah,” says Omar. “Democracy is the right to boo the Dodgers. Democracy is the smell of popcorn, the golden wheat fields rippling in the western breeze, the Sunday movie, the corner drugstore, the mailman’s whistle, the shucking bee and the quilting party, the letters to the editor, the torchlight parade, the new, gleaming cities, the tall forests, the kid on the bike. Democracy is the right of every man to stand up and speak his mind, just as I am doing now.”

  “Very nicely said,” says Sidney. “But you can’t win. The new order is on the march; a new world is in the making. Only the strong and the ruthless shall survive, and that is as it should be.”

  “Oh yeah,” says Omar.

  “I would like to continue this discussion,” says Sidney. “I enjoy your command of language. But, unfortunately, time does not permit. Right now I would like some information. We have reason to believe that the Americans are planning an invasion of this island. You can tell us when. You tell us, and we will send you to a nice, restful detention camp. Refuse and you die.”

  “I’ll tell,” cries Ed.

  Omar whips out a revolver which he had concealed in his tunic and kills Ed.

  “For that you die,” says Sidney. “Take him away. Leave her here.”

  Omar is thrown into a barbed-wire stockade. At the end of several hours Philomene is brought in looking raped. “The bastards,” says Omar. “The bastards!”

  “I did not tell them,” she says.

  “Good girl,” he says.

  It is obvious in another minute that she couldn’t have told them even if she had wanted to because she didn’t know. For he proceeds to tell her the plans. It seems that the Americans are going to make a landing that very night. They are figuring on a surprise landing, but it appears that the Japs are ready for them. “I’ve got to warn them,” says Omar.

  A guard walks by. “What time you got, buddy?” asks Omar.

  “Eight-thirty,” says the guard.

  “Nice wrist watch you got there,” says Omar.

  “Oh, it’s nothing,” the guard answers.

  “Let’s take a look at it.”

  “O.K.,” says the guard. He sticks his hand through the barbed wire. Omar grabs his wrist, while Philomene reaches through, draws the guard’s dirk, and cuts his throat.

  They rush back to the beach. On the horizon the United States invasion fleet can already be seen. The Japs are dug in on the beach. The Yank invasion barges come closer to the shore. “They’ll be ambushed,” Omar whispers. “We’ve got to let them know.”

  They spot a Jap gun emplacement, creep across the sand
, and overpower the two Jap gunners, apparently a pair of mutes. The barges are coming closer, closer. Omar opens fire, turning the gun on the Jap positions. He gets a goodly number of the bastards. The barges turn back. A Jap sneaks up from behind and throws a grenade at Omar and Philomene.

  When the smoke clears they are lying in the dugout neatly bleeding to death from the corners of their respective mouths. “It’s funny going like this,” says Omar. “I used to think of taking you back to my little chicken ranch in Jersey. Got some fine chickens out there, Bearded White Silkies, Naked Necks, Mottled Houdans, Dark Brahmas, and Silver Sebright Bantams. Got a little white cottage with a picket fence and chintz curtains. You’d have loved it.”

  “I—I would have make tiffin for you,” she breathes, sinking fast.

  “Yes, you—you would have made tiffin for me.”

  They kiss bloodily.

  “Good-by,” he says.

  “Good-by,” she answers.

  They die.

  Meanwhile the Yank invasion forces regroup and attack the island from the other, undefended, side. There follows a tremendous battle, including some more shots from Hell’s Angels. By morning the island is in American hands. The finale is a cloud shot with ghostly figures of Omar and Philomene smiling and waving from a two-seater Spad. In the background is a soupçon of Jean Harlow.

  Estherlee and I went out of the theater and into the car. “Some movie,” I said deprecatingly.

  Her eyes flashed, and I noticed for the first time that they were wet. “I didn’t think,” she said hotly, “that you’d gotten so low that you’d make fun of other people dying for their country. Now take me home.”

  There was clearly no use arguing now. I took her home, walked her to the door, where she deftly slipped out of a clinch and left me dejected on the stoop.

  “I’ll think of something,” I mumbled as I drove home.

  CHAPTER TEN

  My Great-Aunt Placenta, a fretful woman who was born with a caul, used to say that one never knew where he would be tomorrow. “One never knows where he will be tomorrow,” was the way she put it. To illustrate, she would tell an anecdote about the time in 1898 when she was riding a train back from Rochester, where she had gone to consult Dr. Will Mayo about a muscular condition caused by sleeping in too short a bed. At Plain Dealing, Minnesota, the train pulled off on a siding to make way for a mercy train bearing a load of ipecac to stricken Lac Qui Parle, a French community whose residents lay in beds of pain after a Bastille Day celebration during which they had consumed vast quantities of wine made by the local vintner, an untidy Parisian named Jacques le Strap, who had neglected to remove his stockings before tramping out the grapes. Aunt Placenta’s car, the last on the train, somehow got uncoupled and was left on the siding when the train resumed its journey. Through some incredible mischance it was hooked onto a passing Northern Pacific bound for Nome, Alaska. Before the error could be rectified Aunt Placenta was in Nome, at that time a boom town jammed to bursting with prospectors. No fool she, she opened a saloon with six bottles of liniment that Dr. Will Mayo had given her.