Thinking of the old man, I read the Columbia University bulletin on the wad outside the English office at Hederman-sever. My idea was to return and take the English hours I needed at Heder man sever to get into graduate school. Just slip into a graduate school come January. As for Columbia, I could imagine those mean bastards up there reading Finnegans Wake upside-down and beating you over the head with their pipes. But the old man would be proud of me up there. So I took down the address and some others and went to see the chairman. When school started in September, I’d reread my Bobbie Burns and rediscovered my hatred for Pope and Henry James, and was ready to make the last dash toward a profession.
One day I was reading “The Leech-Gatherer,” stopped, smiled, and realized I’d forgotten Catherine, Peter, and the Wrags for three weeks.
7 / The Old Boys at Mother Rooney’s
This is the fall that Fleece was leading his class as a sophomore at the med school, Silas was still the leading ass on Capitol Street — at Wright’s — and I was accepted in graduate school. It was 1965, the year I got married and the year of a lot else.
Silas had taken a trip to Europe during summer. One thing he had done was force himself into an art class at the Sorbonne. Some group of artists there told him that the West was finished and that they spat on all Old World art because it was elitist. Silas caught a terrible cold in Spain which enabled him to spit on every church, icon, and masterpiece in southern Europe from a range up to twenty feet. This was really Silas’s cookie.
“More to the point, Europe scared the hell out of you, didn’t it?” said Fleece. Silas was thoughtful.
“That’s true.” Silas turned red and took the stairs up to his room.
“You got him,” I said.
“What’s wrong with the bastard? He’s so mild.”
A week or so later, late at night, I saw Silas come down the stairs through my room and slip down to Fleece’s room. I heard Silas waking up Fleece, heard Fleece swearing. Then the light went on down there, and I could hear the low tones. I went to sleep while the tones kept on.
The next afternoon Fleece emerged into my room. I was reading The Ambassadors by Henry James for a report and was just about fainting with boredom. It was Saturday and Silas was gone.
“You want to know what he said to me last night?” I dropped the book. Bobby Dove looked rather feeble and ill. He sat on the bed.
“He woke me up to confess to me that he couldn’t help it, he was in love with Bet. That he’d gone to Europe so as to forget her. He also wanted me to know that she seemed to be falling in love with him. He asked me if she’d told me she had gone out with him, and I said no, I hadn’t talked to her in a week and a half. This was the time he was concerned about. ‘I don’t want to hurt you. I think a lot of you. But she seems to be coming over my way, Bob,’ he said. I asked him why he thought she was falling for him. You know what he said? ‘Because I have changed. I’ve learned to be humble.’ I told him maybe this was the first time he’d ever been pitied by a woman. He’s so sincere looking at me; this tribulating little smile on his mouth. I told him to get out.”
“Did you call her?”
“I’m not going to call her. Sometimes I don’t call her or see her for weeks. Some time ago we found out this made it all sweeter. That maybe it would never wear out if we kept it like so. She knows I always have a lot to do, and always will. What she does in her own time… I wouldn’t be mad if she let the rich jerk-off buy her a couple of suppers. Me, I’ve bought Brenda the X-ray technician coffee more than a few times. But, Bet knows about that silly tool, the things he is, does, like dragging those mousy little drabs up to his room to hear them squeak over him; like bringing that drunk over as a gift to Mother Rooney. And now he says he’s learned to be humble. I’m sure the confession that at last he knows what a dipshit he is bowled her over.” He smirked and stood up, with his hands at the small of his back, refreshed by the irony of it. Let me comment on how Fleece had changed, physically, in the last couple of years. He was twenty-six, was twenty pounds heavier than he was at Heder man sever, was less nervous, and had replaced the horn-rim glasses with some steel ones, which opened up his face, his bald high forehead, so that he looked like a less-cringing genius who would know what to do if, say, a fire broke out in his room. When he was sick, he was more like a healthy man who’d been knocked down temporarily than someone at rest in his natural disposition, as of old.
“Love,” said Fleece. “And then marriage. We’re married, Bet and me.”
“When did you get married?”
“About at the first of last summer, out at the Alamo Plaza Motel Courts, which we’ve been to again several times. The ceremony went like this: I woke up with my hand on her nipple. She left the bed and went to the television and then got back in bed. She replaced my palm on her nipple, and on the television came a gospel show, the Blackwood Brothers, because it was Sunday morning. These boys were singing in earnest, the bass man with his moustache, the slick skinny man singing high, the blind man with sunglasses on piano. So holy, you know; they’d never made a cent out of doing this. ‘I take this man,’ she said, lifting up the sheets, ‘while these men look on and sing.’ Then she kicked the sheets back and raised her toes to the ceiling, and I enjoyed her, while she hummed with the quartet on TV with her eyes closed. I happened to be on my knees holding onto her ankles above me. It was the condition of being in an ascending chariot. I cherished the music I heard behind me and the music under me. Everyone agreeing, everyone celebrating.”
“But no actual marriage certificate and so on,” I said.
“What do you want?” I felt like a hated skeptic as he left. He’d taken his glasses off. Since his back was to me, I couldn’t tell. But he was weeping or emoting in some way.
The next weekend Fleece was supposed to be in Houston, Texas. He’d told me he was going to fly over and witness some heart surgery by DeBakey and Cooley. Saturday afternoon late I ate some hamburgers at the Krystal. When I came back to the room, going up the stairs through his quarters, I glanced down and saw him sitting in a wooden chair in the shadows by one of the octagonal windows. He hadn’t made a sound. But he was following me with his eyes — otherwise, a manikin. I went on up. I knew he was in a bad state. It was something new and horrifying. I’d never seen him atrophy himself like this. I tried to convince myself to go down there, but couldn’t. I watched his room grow dark as the night came on. I clicked my reading lamp on and took a book.
At ten-thirty, Silas and a girl eased onto the steps below. As they came up, I looked over the edge of my book to get a load of her. She had tousled hair. I expected her feet to be about where her waist was, as she kept coming, kept getting taller, behind Silas, who had one of her hands, leading her politely. She held her shoes in the other hand. I put the book in front of my face immediately when I saw the girl was Bet Henderson. I sank back on the bed.
“Harry looks asleep,” she said.
“That’s right. He’s out for good.”
“Look what you can see up here!” she said as they got to Silas’s room.
I stared at the ceiling, wondering what Fleece was going through downstairs. If he was awake, he’d seen them. Silas shut the door at the top of my stairs. The two of them creaked on the boards above my head. There was a lot of weight up there. In a while I heard Silas’s coffee percolator sighing.