Crackpot, p.32
Crackpot, page 32
As time passed, though Hoda still loved a cheerful bit of a chat and a kibitz with strangers that she met there, her conversation began to reflect the increase of restless bafflement that she felt about everything. The sentences she puzzled together lost some of their youthful clarity and certainty, and gained a little more of the disturbing resonance of ambiguity, took on, in fact, something of a rudely philosophical cast. Oh, she still joked, but her jokes had an acidic, even faintly seditious tone that sometimes made her audience a little uneasy. She would get started on the condition of the water fountain, for instance, out front there, with the pigeons and the lounging bums, and how she wouldn’t take a drink out of it if you paid her. What did the mayor think, she wanted to catch a social disease or something? But then, after a brief guffaw, she would go on more moodily, to the dirt and the spit, and remark on how people could hardly wait to get to the City Hall to clear the disgust from their throats. What could those strangers think when they came to town, all those visitors they had the “Welcome Visitors” sign up front for, whoever they were; for her part Hoda never saw anyone but down and outs and the occasional farmer bringing his wife to show her things weren’t so good in the city either.
And Hoda would ramble on about things she had half-mulled over in her head, making sure she interspersed her comments with jokes, so her fellow patients wouldn’t begin to get restless and turn on their haunches away from her. But sometimes she gave way to the pressure of her thoughts, and went off, after a light-hearted beginning, into long, discursive monologues, noting the restiveness of her captive audience after a while, but unable to stop herself just yet from trying to hunt down and capture the truth towards which her unwinding words seemed to beckon, perennially teasing her to the perennially incomplete revelation of words, and yet more words.
“Have you ever noticed that motto up front? I mean what’s written up on that big fancy shield, right in the centre of the building, up over the front doors. You know, like, our city motto. You don’t even know your own city motto? What kind of citizen are you? I know it all right. I ought to. It says, ‘Commerce, Prudence, Industry.’ That’s my motto too, in fact. I figure if it’s good enough for my home town, it’s good enough for me. Commerce? Any time you like. Prudence? What do you think I’m doing here with the bottle? Industry? Hell, I ain’t had no complaints yet. I figure I’m a model citizen. What I want to know is where does it get me? Ten-twelve years ago, believe it or not, I was sitting here just like this, holding my sample and waiting for the doctor to tell me what a beautiful specimen I got. And here I am still sitting with the bottle. Instead of those pictures they have on that shield up there, that nobody looks at anyway, you know, the sheaf of wheat and the buffalo and stuff, they should pay me to go sit up there, just like I am now, or maybe in my bareskin, on a bench, holding the bottle in my lap. People would look then all right. Yeh.
“Mind you sometimes it pays off. I know a guy it paid off for, in a big way, too. He went into foreign commerce. There’s money in that, if you’ve got the right product. Of course he started small. He was only a driver when he got into the business. Would you believe it, he actually asked my advice whether he should go into it or not? You’d be surprised how many people tell me their troubles, ask my advice. But my friend Hymie, he’s a millionaire today because he didn’t take my advice.” Hoda chucked. She always got a laugh out of remembering how she had advised Hymie to stay away from the booze pipeline people.
“You see what happened, in those days, not so long ago either, just yesterday in fact, when the Americans weren’t supposed to be able to get hold of any liquor, my friend was sniffing around for contacts, because he wanted to build up a really classy floating crap game here in town, with good bootleg stuff to bring in the big money types. First thing he knows he gets offered a job, hauling the whiskey around. ‘Should I take it, Hoda?’ he asks me. ‘It’s good money.’ ‘What’s so good about it?’ I says. ‘Gambling’s one thing,’ I tell him. ‘You can run a pretty clean game. But bootlegging? It isn’t honest! Crooks and murderers and racketeers,’ I says. I don’t mean the friendly-house kind of bootlegging we got here,” Hoda caught herself up quickly. “If the government’s crazy you can’t blame anyone for doing a little under the counter finagling. I don’t ask where every drink somebody offers me came from myself, and I don’t think anyone has the right to tell me I should drink or I shouldn’t, either, or where I can and where I can’t.” Hoda smiled genially at her audience. In a place like this you never knew, you could be talking to bootleggers, and she wasn’t out to hurt any feelings.
“But peddling booze to the Americans, international commerce, stuff like that, you know yourself who gets into that. You see it in the movies. Crooks and murderers and racketeers. ‘That’s no job for a nice Jewish boy,’ I says to him. ‘And besides, it’s too risky. In those rackets it’s the small fry always get caught. The big shots grease their way out of trouble. You want your mother to have to live through it, all the neighbours should know she has a son sitting in jail?’
“So he says, ‘Listen, she complains anyway because I just sit around without a job. At least if I’m in jail I don’t have to listen to her. Anyway, I don’t have to be a racketeer or a murderer. It’s just a job to me, a job with a few risks, so what? Instead of just sitting on my arse I’ll risk it for a change, and if I lose I’ll sit on it again and let the government take care of me.”
Hoda beamed around at the uneasy faces of her captive audience. She loved it when she came to the fairy-tale part of Hymie’s story. Who would have thought that it would happen to Hymie, after all, Hymie whose imagination had never dared soar beyond the vision of himself as the brains of a thriving floating crap and poker game, with three or four handpicked alternate locations, a smoothly organized pickup system, a cheap source of good bootleg booze, to attract the better clientele, and Hoda, all girded about in spangles, to give the deal class and provide the sundries. But who got the glass slipper after all? Those early dreams must look like pretty penny-ante stuff to him now.
“That’s what he used to say me. ‘It’s my arse I’m risking, Hoda!” She liked to repeat her more pungent bits of dialogue, particularly when she encountered faces like these. “Well, when a guy says that, what can you answer? ‘All right, it’s your arse, risk it then!’ And he did, see? And everybody’s kissing it now. You know how come? One of his boss’s daughters happened to notice him. I don’t know, maybe he was lifting a case or something; he’s a big, healthy-looking boy. Anyway, whatever she saw, she liked it. And he had enough prudence, for a change, not to knock her up before her daddy proposed to him. These big-time bootleggers are fussy about how you fool around with their kids. And now Hymie’s moved down East, and he’s gone into industry, and he’s a millionaire today. How do you like that?”
Hoda didn’t expect an answer to her strictly rhetorical question, but went on triumphantly to the moral of her story. “So don’t you ever be ashamed of your city motto, is all I can say. You take those three words, plus a little bit of this and a little bit of that, and you can end up where you won’t ever have to worry about commerce, prudence and industry again, because when you’re up there that high, anything you do or don’t do is all right by everyone all over. And I’m the dumb bunny who tried to tell him it wasn’t honest!” Again she chuckled, solo laughter, shaking her head at her own stupidity. “Honest! Come to think of it, maybe they should change our motto up there altogether. Instead of those three words and those pictures, they should have a picture of a big, naked arse, and underneath it just two words, ‘RISK IT!’” Hoda laughed so hard even those of her fellow patients who were profoundly shocked, particularly the two schoolteachers at whom she had, by some perverse intuition, aimed most of her monologue, and who had not expected to encounter anything like this when they came to get vaccinated before their holiday trips abroad, couldn’t help the momentary flutter of guilty smiles that were not smiles really, but, the involuntary expression of their astonishment. At times one’s own dear familiar country can suddenly seem so foreign.
“Honest, that’s really what happened,” Hoda assured them earnestly. “You don’t have to believe me, but if I named names you’d believe me all right.” After she told the story in a place like this, she worried a little that the goyem might think that all Jews were bootleggers and millionaires. Well, to hell with them. They could see she was poor and honest, couldn’t they? And anyway, whatever you said they’d think what they wanted to. Maybe Hymie was a bootlegger, but those hadn’t been Jews who’d stolen all those millions that were supposed to go into building the Parliament Buildings downtown when she was a kid; they were big-shot gentiles, practising their own variety of commerce, prudence and industry. Let anyone make a crack and Hoda knew what to come back with all right, for all the good it did.
Whatever her visit to the Public Health had been like, whether she had been able to work up an interesting conversation, or had got a few laughs, or had delivered herself of a stimulating monologue, or had just sat alone and stared at the rough, broad dark floorboards, it was always good to get out of there, safe again, at least for another little while. In a mood to give thanks, she usually walked over to the square behind City Hall, to see if there were any comrades she knew around, busy educating the people, so she could maybe cheer them on and help humanity along a little. Not all the comrades enjoyed having her assistance, unfortunately. Some were even quite rude when she offered them encouragement. “But I’m on your side,” she would find herself protesting. “It’s my revolution too.”
Well, it’s a free country, and they couldn’t stop her, when they acted that way, from gathering a little group of people around herself and starting her own separate public discussion. What if she sometimes got off the subject? It could be just as important to give people the feeling of how you felt, and get the feeling of how they felt, as it was to stand up there telling them how they ought to think. If some of those big-talking comrades would stop talking and listen sometimes and try to understand how their audience really felt, they wouldn’t always be so sure of themselves. Every person you talked to hauled out his own favourite strands and snippets of experience, even where they weren’t even relevant, and was passionately faithful to whatever his own personal blend of knowledge and misinformation was, that felt to him like the truth. You could be wrong in your arguments, and so could they, but it was only what you felt that you admitted, and if you felt right, no matter how dearly somebody else thought he was proving you wrong, you weren’t going to give up the argument that made you feel right. Hoda often admitted to herself afterwards that she didn’t know what she was talking about half the time, but she knew about how she felt, and about how people felt, never mind the comrades and their militant-mindedness. They could be as logical as they liked, they wouldn’t get anywhere until they could capture people’s militant feelingness. But they wouldn’t listen to her, even when she tried to tell them.
Sometimes, when her little discussion group degenerated, when that thing happened to her audience–she was never quite sure what it was but she always knew it was happening–when they started throwing mocking comments at her and baiting her about personal things, and egging her on, she knew she had lost them but she had to go on, trying to retrieve the good feeling of friendly contact, even in disagreement. When that happened she was almost glad that they were baiting her again because it was a reminder that this too was what people could be like, not just cheerful fellow-patients in a waiting room, or reasonable citizens solving world problems together; this was how they could turn, as easily as they could turn into the angels the comrades assured them they would become if they changed the world and everybody got the chance to be good. What if you gave them angel food and they still preferred to turn on you this way when they got the chance? So much which she had once thought was unreal and would change because it was a transient distortion in a life which simply hadn’t managed to get into perfect focus yet, she had begun at last to fear was not distortion at all, but the clear reflection of a natural and ineradicable ugliness. What could a person do?
A person could do her best, as Hoda was willing to tell anyone who was willing to listen. Like she and her daddy had done. Look how a blind man’s labour had enabled them to turn the inside of a shack into such a pretty home. Daddy’s hands had begun to slow down some lately, but still they had made enough pretty things to last for ages. She was gratified, often, when she caught the look of surprise in the eyes of a new customer as he gazed around at all those colours, and the clean, delicate buff-yellow of the natural straw in between. “You like the decor?” she would ask.
Large straw mats covered the coarse floorboards, on top of which a straw runner ran from front door to summer kitchen door; that one had to be replaced after winter, because the snow from her customers’ boots soaked it through and started it rotting. But they had plenty more. There were straw mats on the table and on the dressers in their bedrooms, and the orange crates near the windows had straw mats on them, on which sat wicker baskets with Hoda’s plants in them. There were straw mats tacked to the front wall, to help keep out the weather where the verandah had collapsed and ripped away some of their meagre insulation, and to hide the stains of damp coming through. There was even a straw mat on the tank behind the toilet seat, where Hoda kept some of her toiletries. It was lovely.
If only the verandah hadn’t collapsed that way; after all those years of listing a little more each year, it had suddenly buckled, pulling away from the body of the house, and sagging so badly that it was impossible to approach the front door without running the danger of collapsing the whole, delicately balanced structure. Hoda had then hung up a large sign: DANGER. PLEASE USE BACK DOOR. VERANDAH UNDER REPAIR. The last sentence of the sign was for the benefit of city government spies. The fear which had hung over her for years, that some city spy would come along and condemn the old house, had increased tenfold since the visible collapse of the front facade. That’s what they did when they got the chance, chased you out of your own home. That was one of the reasons why she hadn’t applied for government relief when everybody was out of work and she was feeling the pinch too, in her meagre income, because she was afraid the relief spies would come and investigate and report the condition of the house and force them out. Where would they then be able to afford to live, except in somebody’s house, some other working class family, the two of them together in one room? How would she conduct her business then? If they thought they were going to force her back to alleys and backyards like when she was a kid they were mistaken, not after she had fixed everything up so comfortably; she was too old for that kind of kid stuff. And how many of her customers could afford to take her to a hotel? Anyway, once you began in those hotels, the pimps started sniffing around you, and everybody else wanted payoffs too, all the lousy middlemen. She didn’t want to stand around all night either, in all weathers, on street corners, to try to keep her customers circulating. This way she was known; her place was all set up, it was kind of a landmark, even. There might be a big turnover in her business, but the new ones always found out where to come. She had a good reputation. And the old ones, when they wanted to return, could always find out; “Fat Hoda, is she still there in the old place?” She got a lot of nice surprises from old friends she hadn’t seen for years that way, some of them visiting from out of town, some of them just getting nostalgic for old times, who were glad to know that things were still the same.
But if the place was condemned and they were forced to move out, what then? All the good will she had built up, all the friendly atmosphere, all the good company she could offer, the privacy, the relatively spacious accommodation for lounging around and waiting in, the unhurried graciousness of her approach, everything that gave her work a solid foundation would be gone. And then where would they be? No, she’d have to get someone to clear away the verandah altogether, chop it up for firewood, and just have a couple of steps up to the front door. She would pile dirt up against the bottom of the front wall to keep out that damn draught that was bothering Daddy so much lately. In the summer maybe she’d plant flowers or something all around there, so it wouldn’t be so obvious where the verandah had been ripped away.
There was always some new problem to worry about. You just managed to get one thing straightened away and something else turned up. If only it added up to something, but days and years were all that she had thus far been able to add up, to a sum which still surprised her. Who could believe she was suddenly a grown woman already? How to cope with the fact that she was no longer a child? How responsible was she for her childhood when she was so different now? Seraphina used to have a joke she was always repeating, “One thing, Hoda, we sure won’t die not knowing.” Hoda had laughed heartily at that, but now she had begun to wonder whether she wouldn’t rather not have known some things, at that price. What price? Actually, she had avoided presentation of the bill, hadn’t she? She had left no return address. Was that the price, that she was forever more to be haunted by the feeling that there was still a debt outstanding?
