Many Mansions. Isabel Bolton

He stopped and took the check out of his pocket. Made out to Patricia Smith, signed by Philip Ropes the third and countersigned by Patsy. Quite a story in it, a little story à la Chekhov called “The Check.” Should he cash it, should he tear it into ten thousand bits? He returned it to his pocket. He turned the corner into Greenwich Street. The cute little houses continued; but what a difference! What a dismal street—all these trucks that rumbled past the windows and that big ugly building opposite, United States Post Office, mail trucks coming, mail trucks pulling out. Here he was, one of the little red houses all right but what a dingy look to it. Gardens behind, she’d said, and little dormer windows; cute as all get-out. But what good would they do him—living in the basement? Leaving the pushcart on the curb he climbed the stoop and let himself in with a key Patsy had procured from the janitor (he was presumably Patsy’s brother)—good thing the rent was paid a week in advance.

      God, what a stinking hole. He descended the basement stairs, opened and stumbled through a narrow hall to the front, opened and unlocked a sagging door, and found himself in a dark square room below the level of the street, with a very musty odor. It appeared to be furnished. There were two small windows with an outer iron grille giving on a hatchway. He threw them open. Jesus, what a hole. A closed-up fireplace with a black marble mantelpiece adorned one side of the room, and opposite a cot with a green plush spread and two green plush cushions propped against the wall. The floor was covered with a worn linoleum rug, there was a Morris chair by the window upholstered in plum-colored corduroy, very worn indeed, a wooden rocking-chair, and in the center of the room under a cluster of electric lights a rickety table with a marble top. He went to the bed, felt the mattress, sat down on it, smelled the sofa cushions. Jesus Christ.

      His eyes roamed around; took in a passage between his room and one at the back which presumably opened into that garden that Patsy had boasted of, “all those dear little red brick houses opening on their gardens.” He got up, went through the passage, tried the door which was locked and bolted. There were cupboards and running water—everything necessary as Patsy had said. He turned on the taps; the water ran. Well, he’d be damned. Now, what he’d have to do was pull himself together and get his junk in out of the rain.

      It seemed like an interminable business, dumping first one load and then another, no order about it, helter-skelter, pell-mell, angrily making the trip to the sidewalk and back to his room Lord knows how many times. It was somnambulistic, like a dream he’d had before and expected to have innumerable times again, realizing too that he was just one in a regiment of gi brothers having their little love affair with art and the humanities. Here were these folders (the precious manuscript Patsy had been so sarcastic about). Under the bed with it, safe from the rest of the litter. Well, to what else could you turn your allegiance, if you didn’t turn to art? Perambulating the room, taking up this book and that and his eyes roaming round, it seemed to him he was surrounded by masterpieces, cheap editions, the big Giants, and the smaller volumes. God, the room was filled with masterpieces—translations, anthologies—that banged-up box was stuffed with masterpieces, if you turned the right knob at the right moment, they flew into it from the very air you breathed. The records, the victrola, Picasso’s Clowns. Did the fellows making up statistics in the government bureaus get wind of all this, so many gis at this university, so many at that, all his brother veterans attempting to drink from every spring at once? For here was art, the aristocratic, the inaccessible commodity, suddenly made cheap, mass-produced like everything else. You had to hasten, there was a fearful and immoderate haste about it. With the whole of society geared up to the organized production of murder, wholesale slaughter, you had to choose your horse and mount in haste, art and death running it neck and crop.

      Suddenly he seemed to hear again that incredible accumulating volume of sound, and to see the heavens literally sundered to let pass above his head the majestic procession, thousands of planes roaring like express trains through the sky. God, the perfect synchronization, the order and the majesty, morning after morning at the punctual hour, all those bombers on their way to murder old men, children, babies, women, to blow up munition factories. It wouldn’t be so majestic the next great show they staged. Likely to be silent, out of sight, out of sound. Some solitary bomber silent in the stratosphere on its way, God knows where, carrying God knows what infernal freight. Well, stick to the horse you’ve chosen, hurry, hurry like the devil. The race was not entirely reputable either, there were the rivalries, the jealousies, the triumph so public and conspicuous and he saw, though it was the very last thing he wished to see, the picture of Philip Ropes decorating the dust covers, all the blurbs, all the handsome young men who had snatched right out of the jaws of death you might say their little moment of success, flying into the magic beam, gyrating crazily in the public neon.

      God, life came at you from every direction—all the thirsts and hungers that beset you. There was this Babel of voices—literatures, philosophies, distractions—there was the music, wanting to hear it all. It was free now—loose on the air, incised on the rubber discs, canned for your convenience if you had the price for it. Hurry, hurry. And there were the pictures, the exhibitions, the museums, the art shops. No, it was not just the drive to create something on your own; it was these little empires of beauty you needed to build up in your solitary soul, call it culture if you wish to, universal culture, poets, scholars, anthropologists, historians, theologians, philosophers contradicting, asserting, and the musicologists, the art critics, the reviewers—such a babel of tongues, such exquisite distractions, clutching at them all. Good God, thinking you could read, hear, see, get everything all at once, these thirsts and hungers to be assuaged, wanting to drink from all the springs at once, snatching at universal culture, being, as you damned well knew you were, the most solitary, the most lonely individual that ever at any moment in the march of mad events had trod upon the earth.

      It was multitude from which we suffered, all that everybody had to tell us, buzzed around and blown upon by all the conversations and the arguments. Our traffic with each other, what a queer attempt to protect our aloneness. Christ, how we loved our own aloneness. We did plenty of howling about it, it was a central theme of all our art expressions. None the less we hugged it jealously. We were incapable of giving because there was so much within our reach to grab and snatch and gather for our own, our solitary souls.

      Take his relationship to women. Always the same old story. There was Patsy now—her fresh, her lovely body; yet the more he ravished it, the closer he drew to it, the farther she retreated with her loneliness, the more she cherished her little empire of selfhood, extending it, hoarding it up, subjecting each experience to analysis, to some damned way or another of getting wise about herself. It was just this of which she had complained to him about his own behavior. What was it she had said had made her sick of him, sick and tired of this way he had—taking the pulse of each vibration?

      He flung himself down on the bed. He was mortal fagged. This putting the energies and muscles to work on tasks so uncongenial drained the life blood out of him. He’d never set this place to rights. God!—what a hole in the wall—the worst he’d ever had. He buried his face in the green plush cushions. Phooey, how they stank! Imagine sleeping on a bed like this. He groaned.

      My Old Lady—Mol! Why not call her up and ask her to cash this check? Simple enough. Hadn’t he been suppressing his resolve to do so right along? Sure he had. The money was his. It wasn’t as though it came to him from Ropes. It was the payment of a debt. Patsy owed it to him. Why be so stiff-necked about it? Ridiculous to think he could beat it, beg his way until he got the gi check.

      Mol—what a queer, eccentric bird she was. He had a real affection for her. When he came right down to it, he’d have to admit she was the only human being in this benighted city who really cared for him. Absurd she was, caring so much about the bloody world, so dramatic about everything, beating her chest and flashing those astonishing eyes. “If you’d lived as long as I have, my dear boy,” always getting back at him with her age and her experience. She seemed to him, in spite of all the books she’d read and her fine assumption of knowing all there was to know, innocent as a May morning; virginal he’d swear.

      The longer he lay here and tried to make up his mind to telephone, the less likely he’d be to find her in. It must have stopped raining by now. Very likely she’d be out. He got up, and going to the window, craned his neck to see just what the day was like.