Crackpot, p.29
Crackpot, page 29
Better than anything, she listened to him. Nate could not imagine saying to either of his manicured daughters-in-law some of the things he could just naturally talk about with Hoda. Why, they would lock him away if they ever saw him doing his takeoffs. All of them together, with Gusia in the lead, would have him carted off to the little red brick house if he ever did go crazy enough to act his real natural self with them. What a thing to have to say about your whole life! Who was crazy in this world?
“So what happened?” Hoda prodded.
“You can imagine,” said Uncle, “a bunch of kids asleep in a dormitory, and one of them wakes up and there’s this weird shadow jumping around on the walls in the moonlight. You’re half asleep and there’s this apparition, jerking around, bending over the beds…”
“Scared ’em?” said Hoda.
“Shitless!” said Uncle. “Time the Duchess gets there it’s bedlam, and nobody with the sense to turn on the light.” Uncle made the gesture of the sensible widow Tize flicking on the light switch, then sprang round with unselfconscious agility to crouch, like a trapped animal, Mrs. Limprig trying to disappear into the far wall of the dorm.
Something funny happened to Hoda then. In the middle of her laughter she was jerked through her own skin and found herself, suddenly illuminated, clawing the wall in the roomful of screaming children.
“But why?” Hoda cried out, shuddering, for Mrs. Limprig had crackled through her like a crazing of the flesh.
“Why? Why?” said Nate. “I just told you.” He tapped his head. Mrs. Limprig had come to cover the kids who threw off their blankets in the night, particularly one kid, the foundling, whom Uncle had last seen skipping along beside her, while she moved in what could have been a crazy imitation of the skipping child. Uncle had shown how they looked, acting first one then the other, back and forth in an orchestration of jerks and twitches.
But Hoda didn’t mean that when she cried out “Why?” She cried out against expanding suddenly into another’s world, experiencing another’s flesh, another’s senses, comprehending another’s anguish; why should she have to know that? Why should she have to know Mrs. Limprig as she had never known anything before? All she had wanted was to keep in touch. I know, I know, I know. The very words expanded, vibrated with inexpressible meanings and dimensions of pain and exhilaration.
It was gone almost immediately, her revelation, and Hoda, who had cried out against it, wanted it back, the sudden enlargement, the unbidden, anguished thrill, the knowing that was not just trimmed to your head but flowed through your whole being.
She was afraid that Uncle would recognize some change in her voice when she said, with another’s lingering despair, “So you told her to stay away from the dorms.”
But Uncle was having too much fun to notice the collision and absorption and sundering of worlds. “Not me, Limprig himself told her. Listen, they have a hard enough time keeping help in that place. If we start dragging them out of bed in the middle of the night they’ll all quit. The Duchess will go crazy. We’ll have to stick a broom up her arse…” Uncle roared out at his own vision of the immaculate housekeeper with cleaning implements in every available member and orifice, doing the job alone, and repeating endlessly her high purpose as she waggled her brooms fore and aft, the stirring little slogan born of an innocent reverence for the past, which she brought forth at every opportunity. “This was once a Stately Home, and if we all pull together, it will always be a Stately Home.”
Uncle Nate got particular enjoyment out of kidding around about that Mrs. Tize, whose English accent in fact intimidated him. A Jewish woman, penniless, you could say an immigrant like himself, why should she look so antiseptic and sound so la-de-da?
Even Director Limprig, B.A., came in for his share of Uncle’s mockery. Well, he was a mark, for heaven’s sake, a man who couldn’t even talk to a woman without snaking his eyes down to his fly every few seconds, as if he was terrified something would jump out and go “cuckoo!” at her. And Nate would pungently speculate on Limprig’s possible relationship with Mrs. Tize, since it was unimaginable that he could get his wife to hold still long enough to…and what the hell, any normal, healthy male…. Of course the Duchess would probably subject that cuckoo of his to all sorts of hygienic rites; he could imagine…. Uncle just barely remembered in time that he was too much of a gentleman to discuss these with a woman, even his whore of a niece, though she could probably tell him a thing or two. Reminded, Nate clamped his lips together and glared reproachfully at Hoda.
He sure had his moods. Once, when Uncle had been holding forth on Mrs. Tize and her superiority and standards of cleanliness that made it so difficult to keep help at the orphanage, Hoda, in an unguarded moment, had suggested impulsively, “I could work for her.” Uncle had gone coldly still, except for the perceptible quivering of his self-esteem around the edges. “My niece?” was all he said finally, after an impressively extended pause, during which he wondered savagely what the hell he was doing here. And indeed, that time he left shortly after, and stayed away so long that Hoda was beginning to fear they had lost him again. Though she was amused by a scale of preference which would rather accept her on her back than on her knees, she trod carefully indeed around Uncle’s dignity when he finally honoured them with his company again.
Hoda’s experience of Mrs. Limprig opened her up to the possibility of further inner expansion into other worlds. If that could happen between you and somebody you’d never even seen, what of the people with whom you were in actual fleshly contact, could you enter them too, and at will? Could a human being bear the pain of so much growth and such fierce illumination? Is that what God was? Poor God! Imagine comprehending everything, totally, constantly, in that way, the pain of it, and the thrill of power in it! Words and their threaded links were merely a pretty game you played compared to real knowing. And yet that was how you spent your whole life, diddling with the trinkets and sniffing around the edges of what really was.
It would be nice to be able to talk to somebody about what had happened to her, but she could see where it would only get her into trouble with Mr. Polonick, the most likely person, if she tried to speculate with him about her revelation. He would probably accuse her of being faithless to her atheism, or something, and badger her to admit that what she had felt could have meant this and that, anything but what it was, and think he was flattering her, as he sometimes did, to soften his criticism, by telling her all about her sympathetic and hyperactive imagination. Before she knew it, his reasonings would be standing triumphant over the corpse of her real experience. No thanks.
She knew what she knew, and it was not the last time she was to experience those sudden spasms of comprehension of simultaneous worlds. Sometimes it was a total stranger, glimpsed in the street, knowing what it felt like to be in his body, comprehending in a flash the cast of his being. Sometimes it was more detailed, and she had to experience the complexity of a particular experience in another’s life, and for an instant she was caught in an excruciating resonance. Maybe that was what made it so hard to bear, all the vibrations and the echoes of being one and more than one. Why me? she would protest, and almost immediately would begin to wonder how to do it again.
Could you train yourself, if you tried hard enough, to go in and out of people at will? What if she practiced with her customers, really concentrated. If you could time it right, could you manage to jump into him just as he was jumping into you, and feel exactly what it felt like to be him pumping it into you? She’d often thought it would be nice to feel what they were feeling too. If you could get it to work then you really would find out what it was like to go fuck yourself.
The thought broke her concentration at a crucial moment, and provoked a gust of hilarity right into the face of a customer’s passion. Fut! Everything got spoiled for him and Hoda felt just awful, and tried to make him stay and try again and was so nice to him, but everything she did just seemed to make him more dejected, and she couldn’t blame him. No guy likes to get laughed at just when he’s giving you his present. A person had to be so careful, even though she might have the highest aims. After that she didn’t try it often with the guys. She had a living to make, and she couldn’t risk driving away her customers, even for the sake of science. Only sometimes when she felt a particular attraction, she would try to concentrate on becoming what was behind his eyes, because it must be such an extraordinary thing to become the one you loved loving you. Of course for it to be really right he should be trying for the same thing, shouldn’t he? In which case he would be two people, himself and you, and you would be two people, yourself and him, so you would both be four people, who were really only one person, since each was the other. Boy, could you get all mixed up, just thinking around, but Hoda enjoyed it. There was no end to it. You could spend your whole life just thinking around, if you had to, though it was not like knowing, and anyway, who had the time to think much or to know much for that matter, the way things kept happening and changing the whole basis of your thoughts, just when you thought everything was more or less in its place for the time being.
Poor Uncle, he might be rich and a capitalist exploiter, but sometimes he did try to help people, in his own way, and he really wanted theirs to be the best-run orphanage in Canada. He was so upset. Who would have guessed that such an educated man as Mr. Limprig would turn out like that, and be so stupid as to let himself get caught at it, too? Little girls yet. Immoral. Criminal, SHMOK! Such fine tits as Mrs. Tize’s, just hanging around, and a man chooses to ruin a perfect set-up, which he ran like clockwork, “like clockwork,” Uncle mourned. That a man should have no discretion! It wasn’t as though all the kids were total orphans, or even real orphans at all. Some were sent in from the country just to be near Jewish schools and high schools. They had parents who cared about them. It was bound to leak out. The little girl who had leaked had managed to bring together her separated parents by telling her mother how nice Mr. Limprig was to her sometimes. Now her parents, instead of hating each other, hated the orphanage because it was unfit to bring up their children.
And how come the Duchess had known nothing? She probably couldn’t believe it of a man who kept his fingernails so clean. Uncle couldn’t resist mocking Mrs. Tize, as though it was somehow her fault that she was interested in the wrong kind of dirt. Mrs. Tize, when confronted with the story, had been staggered. A perfect gentleman, always such a perfect gentleman in all the years they’d worked together.
“Sure, because you’re not seven years old, he’s a perfect gentleman.”
“Oh that poowa child,” Mrs. Tize had wept. “I don’t understand,” Uncle mimicked her, “I just don’t understand.”
“Who understands?” Uncle wanted to know. “When you have to start worrying about understanding it’s too late already.”
Hoda had listened to Uncle at first with a detached attitude to all the fuss. She was, if anything, slightly amused. It was hard not to suspect that what Uncle hated most was the inconvenience. And after all, Limprig had not actually harmed the kids. Where would she and Daddy be if Yankl hadn’t helped them out that first while? She’d probably be a graduate of Limprig’s finger instead of Yankl’s short arm. Hoda swallowed a giggle. Still, it was interesting to hear how horrified everyone was and how the father had threatened to kill Mr. Limprig and how hard it was to get him to agree it would be better all round to hush it up. And in spite of Uncle’s scorn she was a little moved by the way Mrs. Tize had wept in English. But it was not until Daddy hesitantly began to question Uncle in Ukrainian, and Uncle answered, groping for words, and Daddy got so upset, and was so disgusted, and cried out in Yiddish against human baseness, that something came to life in her, shards of an irrevocable Hoda buried all these years in her own flesh, searing through her to a lost wholeness. This time the instant of illumination was like an electrocution. The fat, hungry little girl pushing open the door of the butcher shop, the bell tinkling above, warmth rushing over her, and clean meat smell; her moccasins scuffing through the sawdust, feet drawing lines as she approached, heavy-footed with dread that he might send her away empty-handed, not knowing yet and knowing all. Her nose dripped, and Hoda tried to draw the sleeve of her coat in such a way across her face that the butcher wouldn’t realize she was wiping her snot, and send her away in disgust. Yankl, behind the counter, talking, talking, beckoning; the pile of scraps beside the chopping board; Hoda obediently taking her glove off, the wincing of the soft, elastic skin and Yankl snatching it away with a grunt as it wilted prematurely between her cold, red fingers. Yankl’s voice commanding “Wait,” as he turned away, and “Blow on your fingers, suck them, suck them,” and all the other words that helped him to get it ready again while she obeyed, sucking her fingers and hoping maybe it would be the whole pile of meat and bones for her and Daddy. “Now!” the soft, elastic film of skin working over the hard, slightly granular tube to its rubbery knob and back to the hair that always got left in her hand, back and forth, “Hard, hard. FASTER!” The spasm, the sudden, disturbing limpness, jerked quickly away, and Yankl, still talking, wrapping the scraps and hurrying her out of there. Fat little Hoda in eternal triumph anyway, hurrying home, and fat big Hoda, comprehending, in infinite grief.
“What are you crying about?” repeated Uncle impatiently. “I told you I fixed everything.”
It had simply never occurred to her before. He could have given me the scraps. You don’t do that to children. Hoda suddenly stopped crying, raised swollen eyes to Uncle, uttered, with difficulty, the panic question, “Did he touch the boys?”
Uncle was again irritatingly reminded of the limitations of this niece of his. He had come with the generous impulse to share a diplomatic triumph, and instead of the admiration he expected, Hoda managed to make him remember uneasily that the board had sworn itself to secrecy. “Not enough the girls?” growled Uncle.
“Yeh,” said Hoda bitterly, “yeh,” but was relieved, too, that the future was still intact, or at least unknown.
It was true, curiously enough, that during the Limprig investigation, it was Uncle Nate, least subtle of men, who distinguished himself above all the other members of the board. He had, during the past number of years in which he had been invited to sit on more than one board and partake of numerous counsels, gained enormously in his confidence in himself as a man fitted to sit among the worthiest. He had risen to such a height among the beautiful that he no longer felt it necessary to be perpetually concerned about whatever enemies might wish him ill. Freed of such petty hostilities he could turn his mind to problems and assess them with clarity and a certain admirable rude justice.
Having dissuaded the child’s father from calling in the police, they were left with the question, what to do with Limprig? The man’s behaviour from the beginning, when the chairman of the board brought him unexpectedly face to face with his accuser, with a gruff, “Let’s settle this here and now,” had been most frustrating. He had retained, in face of the child’s father, an admirable imperturbality of surface, over flesh which had turned to jelly. Of his inner state, only a faintly glossy sheen on the skin of his face gave indication, and the curious softness of his voice, when the chairman stated the charge in an embarrassed way and urged him strongly to deny the absurdity, and Limprig murmured in response, “The child exaggerates.” The chairman was at first puzzled, then put off, and finally dismayed by the curious offhand quality of Limprig’s reiterated demurring murmur, which had almost an air of modesty to it, in his soft, melancholy, albeit a trifle nervous tones. “The child exaggerates. No really, the child exaggerates.” This was hardly the thundering disclaimer required. But it puzzled the angry father sufficiently to keep him silent and uneasy. He was a simple working man, not used to these educated perverts. If the man was innocent why wasn’t he shouting? On the other hand, what if he was so innocent he didn’t need to shout? Could the child, after all, have been lying to them? How come, when they never paid much attention to her chatter anyway, they were suddenly listening so hard to this? It had better be true, it had just better be true, or they would be sorry, they would, wife and daughter both.
Escaping, Limprig went directly to his suite, locked himself in, and stood with his back against the door. Naomi Limprig, who had been preparing to go out and take her station at the library window, for the children would soon be coming home from school, took one look at his face. “What is it, Shmuel?” she asked, with difficulty, but she already knew. She turned and shuffled back into the bedroom and lay down on the bed. Pretty soon he would come in, and sit on the bed, and whether or not she pretended to be asleep, he would explain and explain and explain. Selfish Naomi, she would not even listen, no, not any more. Now all she would hear was the roaring sound in her ears of her own small world tumbling over and over as it fell.
Almost immediately, the board received a note from Limprig, very well if somewhat ambiguously expressed, in which he referred to the exaggerations of children, the loss of confidence of the board, and the impossibility of functioning in such a situation. He ended by tendering his resignation, in order, he explained, to avoid further embarrassment and above all, any damage to the institution which he loved so well and could assure them he had served as faithfully as was in his power these past fifteen years.
