What Hank and Frank have failed to understand, however, is that marriage changes everything. It isn’t just a question of two people deciding to live together, it’s the beginning of a long struggle that pits one partner’s will against the will of the other partner, and although the husband often appears to have the upper hand, it is the wife who is ultimately in control. The newlyweds abandon their respective apartments in Hell’s Kitchen and Greenwich Village and take up residence in a larger, more comfortable place on West Twenty-fifth Street. Since Alice has left her secretarial job in the D.A.’s office, she is in charge of all household affairs, and while she routinely asks her husband for his opinion about the new curtains she wants to buy, the new rug she is planning to put in the living room, the new chairs she is dreaming about for the dining room table, Quine’s response is always the same—Whatever you want, Babe, it’s your call—which means, in effect, that Alice makes all the decisions. But no matter, think Hank and Frank. Alice might be the ruler of the roost now, but they still get to spend their days with the master, pounding the pavement in search of crooks, grilling suspects in the interrogation room, appearing in court to testify at trials, following up leads on the telephone, typing reports, running down alleys whenever a bad guy is foolish enough to bolt, going to Penn Station for their twice-weekly buffings from Moss, and now that Benton has given Ed and Fred the old heave-ho, they have a new pair of associates to work with, Ned and Ted, surly customers to be sure, but not half as bad as the recently departed ratty buggers, which would suggest that while many things are different now, the essential things are the same, perhaps even slightly better than they were before. Or so Hank and Frank tell themselves, but what they don’t know, and what their complacency prevents them from grasping, is that sweet-voiced Alice is on a mission, and her efforts to improve the master’s life will not stop at curtains and rugs. Within three months of the wedding ceremony, she is forging on into the realm of her husband’s clothes, in particular the clothes he wears at work, which she contends are too dull and shabby for a man who is destined to become a captain one day, and though Quine responds somewhat defensively at first, saying that his suits are good enough, more than adequate for the kind of job he does, Alice wears down his resistance by telling him how handsome he is and what a dashing figure he’d cut in a top-of-the-line outfit. Both flattered and annoyed by her compliments, the master makes a witless crack about how money doesn’t grow on trees, but he knows he has lost the battle, and on his next day off he reluctantly follows his wife to a men’s store on Madison Avenue, where his wardrobe is refurbished with a couple of new suits, four white shirts, and six of the skinny ties that are now in fashion. Three mornings later, as the master dons one of those new suits before heading off to work, Alice breaks into a broad smile and tells him how impressive he looks, but then, before he can get a word out of his mouth, she glances down at his feet and says: I’m afraid we’ll have to do something about those shoes.
What’s wrong with them? Quine asks, beginning to show some irritation.
Nothing really, she says. They’re just old, that’s all — and they don’t go with the suit.
That’s ridiculous. They’re the best pair of shoes I’ve ever owned. I bought them at Florsheim’s the day after my promotion, and I’ve been wearing them ever since. They’re my lucky shoes, Angel. Three years on the job, and in all that time not one shot fired at me, not one punch thrown at my face, not a single bruise anywhere on my body.
That’s just it, Abner. Three years is a long time.
Not for a pair of brogans like these. They’re not even fully broken in yet.
Alice purses her lips, cocks her head, and playfully strokes her chin, as if trying to assess the shoes with the solemn detachment of a philosopher. At last she says:
Too clunky. The suit makes you look like an important man, but the shoes make you look like a cop.
But that’s what I am. A cop. A goddamned flatfoot.
Just because you’re a cop, that doesn’t mean you have to look like a cop. The shoes give you away, Abner. You walk into a room, and everyone thinks: There’s a cop. With the right pair of shoes, they’d never even guess.
Hank and Frank wait for the master to speak up for them, to say a few more words in their defense, but Quine says nothing, answering Alice’s last remark with an inscrutable grunt, and a moment later they are traveling with him as he walks to the front door of the apartment and leaves for work. The day is no different from any other day, nor is the next day any different from the day that preceded it, and Hank and Frank begin to hope the conversation with Alice was no more than a false alarm, that her harsh judgments about their value to the master are not shared by Quine himself, that the whole nasty business will blow away like a thin, passing cloud. Then it is Saturday, another day off from police work, and out goes Quine with their new enemy, the obtrusive, opinionated Alice, out in his weekend loafers as they stand beside the bed and wait for the couple to return, never once suspecting that they are about to be betrayed by the man they have served so loyally for the past three years, and when the master comes back later that afternoon and tries on his new pair of oxfords, Hank and Frank suddenly understand that they have been booted out and dismissed, purged by the upstart regime that has taken over the household, and because they have no recourse, no tribunal in which to lodge a complaint or present their side of the story, their lives are over and done with, stomped out by the palace coup that otherwise goes by the name of marriage.
What do you think? Quine asks Alice, as he finishes lacing the oxfords and stands up from the bed.
Beautiful, she says. The best of the best, Abner.
As Quine walks around the room, acquainting his feet with the spring and texture of his new workday companions, Alice points to Hank and Frank and says, What should I do with these old fogeys?
I don’t know. Put them in the closet.
You don’t want me to throw them out?
No, put them in the closet. You never know when I might need them again.
So Alice puts Hank and Frank in the closet, and while the master’s parting words seem to offer some hope that they will be recalled to duty one day, months pass without any changes, and little by little they resign themselves to the fact that the master will never slip his feet into them again. The two brogans are bitter about their enforced retirement, and all through their early weeks in the closet they talk about how cruelly they have been treated, wailing forth their grievances in long, foul-mouthed diatribes against the master and his wife. Not that this moaning and groaning does them any good, of course, and as dust begins to settle upon them, and as they begin to understand that the closet is their world now, that they will never leave it until the day they are junked, they give up their complaining and start to talk about the past, preferring to relive the old days instead of dwelling on the miseries of the present, and how good it is to remember their adventures with the master when they were young and vigorous and had their place in the world, how pleasant it is to recall the weathers they walked in, the myriad sensations of being outdoors in the fluctuating airs of planet Earth, the sense of purpose that had been given to them by belonging to the bigness of human life. More months go by, and their reminiscing slowly comes to an end, for it is becoming difficult to talk now, difficult even to remember, not because Hank and Frank are sinking into old age but because they have been cast aside, and shoes that are no longer taken care of go downhill rapidly, their exteriors dry up and crack when they cease to be shined and polished, their interiors stiffen when human feet no longer enter them to provide the oils and perspiration necessary to keep them soft and pliable, and slowly but surely cast-aside shoes begin to resemble blocks of wood, and wood is a substance incapable of thinking or speaking or remembering, and now that Hank and Frank have come to resemble two blocks of wood, they are nearly comatose, living in a shadow world of black voids and barely flickering candle flames, and so insensitive have their bodies become during their long incarceration that they feel nothing when the Quines’ three-year-old son Timothy slips his feet into them one afternoon and clomps around the apartment laughing, and when his mother sees his little feet inside those enormous, comatose shoes, she starts laughing as well. What are you doing, Timmy? she asks. I’m pretending to be Daddy, he says, and then his mother shakes her head and frowns, telling the boy she’ll give him a nicer pair of big shoes to play with, those brogans are so filthy and used up that it’s time to get rid of them. How fortunate it is that Hank and Frank can no longer hear anything or feel anything, for once Alice has given her son his father’s current pair of dress shoes, she picks up Hank and Frank with her left hand, puts her right hand on top of Timmy’s head, and then leads him out into the hall toward the incinerator chute, which is located in a minuscule box of a room behind an unlocked door. I’d forgotten all about these ratty old buggers, she says, pushing down on the handle of the incinerator chute door and allowing her son to do the honors, meaning he can perform the task of disposing of the shoes, and so little Timothy Quine takes hold of Hank, and as he casts him seven floors down into the basement furnace, he says, Good-bye, shoe, and then he takes hold of Frank and repeats the operation, saying Good-bye, shoe, as Frank follows his brother into the fire below, and before another day has dawned over the island of Manhattan, the two sole mates have been transformed into an indistinguishable mass of red, glowing cinders.