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The Locusts Have No King

Steerforth Press

... journey into the juke-box ...

Wherever he went that night people insisted on confiding in him. Perhaps some fear of his fellow-men gleamed in the young man's intense blue eyes that made them want to reassure him that they, too, were unarmed. Perhaps his eager haste suggested a mission of love, so circumstance must conspire mischievously with people to delay him.

It began when he stepped confidently into a taxi at Fourth and Bank, gave the address on East End Avenue, suddenly felt in his change pocket, then in his wallet with an expression of acute chagrin, impatiently crumpled his hat under his arm and stepped out on the street again. Frowning he considered Umberto's Grotto lettered in white on a blue canopy tilted up to street level like a tea-pot snout. He dashed down the stairs but the man he sought had just left. While he hesitated in the doorway his taxi escaped and pudgy Umberto clutched his lapel to lament how grievous had been the mistake of listening to relatives, adding a garden and Muzak, and how much happier he, being a simple man of simple tastes, would be if only his worthless wife and children could have fallen in the East River. A man should never marry, said Umberto, and would gladly have revealed more, generously offering a glass of Chianti and a toast "Salut e figli masci!" but Frederick pleaded that his emergency would permit him to waste no time. Perhaps he could find Murray in those spots further east, suggested Umberto following him up the steps and making a wide gesture toward the lights beyond Sheridan Square. Pulling his topcoat around his neck, Frederick hurried out into the chilly March rain. He had lived long in the neighborhood but everything looked strange and new tonight, a little terrifying to a man just emerged from seven years' burial in the dead ages. Tonight the work was completed and it was as if he had just returned from a long voyage and must grope eagerly but a little uncertainly for the old familiar landmarks. Each block toward the bright lights seemed a century's step through a tunnel of darkness toward Lyle — and life. Names of bars mentioned by Murray flickered vaguely through his memory, and he stepped tentatively into one called the Florida.

It surprised him that everyone knew Murray. Everyone knew Murray Cahill and his nocturnal habits far better than did the man who had shared his apartment for years. This was Murray's world. In the Florida Tavern a long-nosed girl with sleek head, chin sliding into a gaunt length of black sweater and slacks, looked up at mention of the name. Her long feet in ballet slippers hooked over the rungs of the bar stool.

"Try the America's bar two blocks over and up," she suggested. "He goes there first. How about sticking around here for a while? Have a drink. I gotta talk to somebody. No? Okay, okay."

Hurrying across the street the misty golden lights made faces blur as in a dream, shine brightly for a second, then fade into a half-smile, a moustache, harlequin spectacles, wide red lips. Little dark streets waited for footsteps, invited shadows to creep back to forgotten ages; cats' eyes peered up from cellar windows, watched from sloping roofs for some signal from the hidden moon. Frederick felt like the banquet guest in the fairy-tale who took the wrong overshoes and stepped out into another age. He wondered if his disguise was adequate, if his toga showed. He wondered if the day would ever come when he would cease being the stranger, the solitary wanderer, the observer without passport or knowledge of the language. Like a shy but curious nursery child in adult wonderland, he peered into the Americas whose blue neon sign cast a warning green shadow on each new arrival. The bar was long and narrow with a juke-box glowing like hell-fire in the back, bellowing demon songs to the damned. No Murray in sight.

"Murray ought to be in the Barrel about now," said the waiter. "He doesn't get in here till around two as a rule."

"Have a drink," said a man at the bar, a bald fat man in a plaid shirt. "I think I'm being stood up but I'm waiting to make sure. She said she'd be here, but that's the way she is. This isn't the first time. You look like an intelligent guy, I'd like to ask you a question. Now I'm a married man. My wife — here, take a seat."

"I'm sorry, I'm late," Frederick apologized and hastened into the street again, darting in and out of the cafés of Rubberleg Square, so-called for the high percentage of weak-kneed pedestrians. Rough bar, fancy bar, bars with doormen, bars with sawdust floors — Murray was bound to be in one of them, but which? Frederick was astonished at the variety at first, and then at their inevitable sameness.

Wherever he went he found advertising men all weeping into their Bourbon of happy days when they were star reporters on the Providence Journal. They yearned to tell him their dreams and disappointments. Sometimes they were with petulant wives, who, if from the South, had been the prettiest girls in Tallahassee; if from the Middle West their folks had the biggest house in Evansville. Sometimes these men, happier by far when cub reporters than now with their twenty thousand a year, were not with wives but with stylists, camera ladies, women's-angle-women from their offices, all emotionally fulfilled by making fat salaries, wearing Delman shoes and Daché hats, and above all being out with The Office and talking shop. These were the women who had won the war, the spoils were theirs; these were the women who had found a swansdown paycheck warmer in bed than naked Cupid. Wherever he went Frederick found the new race of men and women, the victors who had won by default, who had sold a pint of Type O for the merest goldmine. Wherever he went his sobriety induced warm overtures from total strangers unable to make friends by day.

Hopefully looking around the bar of the Barrel, most regal of the neighborhood bistros, he was pounced upon by a man from the K.G.R Advertising Agency whose tears over good old newspaper days were mingled with belligerent pride in cigarette campaigns.

"Just wait till you see what I've done with Hazelnut," the K.G.R man boasted, detaining Frederick by the lapel. "Just a woman's hand holding a flaming match and the line, 'Let Me Give You a Light.' Just that one line, mind you, but it sings. Hazelnut knows it. K.G.R knows it. They've got to admit it. 'Let Me Give You a Light.' And the match playing like a searchlight over a pack of Hazelnut Cigarettes up in the sky. It's good, damn it, if I do say so myself."

"Excellent," Frederick said, wary as he always was with genial men, not wishing to rebuff them but dreading their intrusion.

The K.G.R man removed his right hand from the lapel, loosened his hold on the highball glass, readjusted his foot on the rail, and swaying briefly at the loss of support transferred his grip to Frederick's reluctant hand. He smile engagingly.

"Hi fella. I like you. You're all right. You know what it's all about. Got a poker face but I can tell you catch. Jack, give this guy a drink. Here, fella, sit down here. I had a girl but she blew. Where'd Dodo go Jack?"

"Thanks, I won't have any more," Frederick said, and in an effort to discourage further intimacy turned to the bartender with a stern, almost accusing voice. "Where's Murray?"

Suddenly he felt foolish. It seemed to him that customers and bartender looked up suspiciously at his haughty tone. It seemed to him they must guess at once that he was a stranger to these places, queasily dismayed by the revellers clustering around the little red piano lustily singing old songs and spilling their drinks on the colored pianist; the smell of ancient tombs and crumbling ruins must be about him; Latin footnotes and ravellings of doctors' theses must be swarming in pursuit of him like hungry moths. Prudently he said no more when the bartender, ignoring his previous protest, placed a drink before him.

"Murray's hat's still checked," said the bartender coldly. "He'll be back."

He knows, thought Frederick, that Murray's roommate doesn't belong, plays no part in the neighborhood's midnight antics; he recognizes a discreet, sober man certain never to drink except within his means, to resent amiable offers of treats and therefore not to reciprocate; here is a man unlikely to create the mirage of gaiety that impels customers to magnificent gestures; here is a man who would remember that tomorrow was Rent Day when it was his turn to buy a drink, a man who would not admit the compulsions of bar room etiquette. Here is a man who ought to get out and make room for the genuine members; maybe he speaks a dozen languages but he doesn't speak ours. "Nor understand," Frederick admitted, listening to the strange phrases fly back and forth around him.

"The Detroit Free Press? ... Good God, old man, then you knew Jack Huberman? ... You did? ... Well, I was on the Post-Dispatch by that time, then I went to Ivy Lee ..." "What — you were with IvyLee? ... I left there for J. Walter Thompson ... what? ... no! no! ... Have a drink! ... You were? ... No! No! ... You were? ... Have a drink ..."

He turned to thank the K.G.R man but the latter had found a more congenial attachment at the other end of the bar, another old newspaper man now in public relations. Hazelnut campaign was forgotten in the joyful exchange of old encounters with Huey Long, Ford; intimate anecdotes of front-page names; fond reminiscences of the great hearts of Hearst, Howard, Munsey, Patterson, McCormick. Frederick listened, meditating on the curious way newspaper men, despite their apprenticeship in realities, end up convinced by their own romantic inventions, respectful of the celebrities their own lies created, teary over sob-stories they had made up themselves, doffing their plumes reverently to whatever powers had kept them down. The public relations man, a stout little chap named Mooney with a trim moustache, spoke sardonically of the prostitution of his journalistic genius, but as he heard himself sneer at the first-water phonies whose reputations he preserved, stuffed, and mounted, he was moved to awe at his own power and its fabulous possibilities. He might be engaged in the world's most degrading occupation but at least he was better at it than anyone else. He called to two ladies in a booth to affirm this, both of them high in the business world — one in Gimbel's or Altman's department store, the other in real estate. The ladies paused in the midst of their comparison of income-tax to declare that Mooney was certainly the best there was, and they only wished they had his accounts.

Mooney gratefully shook their hands and even went to the trouble to explain that he was the soul of honesty, refusing to touch certain large sums that clients had placed at his disposal into which he could have dipped without the big saps knowing the difference, but which, in his ridiculous honesty, he never even considered touching, unless, of course, it was absolutely necessary, and in view of how much money the particular clients had a person need really feel no compunction about rewarding his honesty with a little extra dividend, what the hell, we're all in business, we know what time it is. The K.G.R man lurched up to receive equal attention, jostled Public Relations aside to lean across the table and recount his Hazelnut inspiration, was so overwhelmed by their polite attention that he ordered more drinks to add to the regiment of glasses before them, drinks consumed, drinks started, and the drinks Public Relations had ordered; he invited them to dance, to sit at the bar, to go up to the Blue Angel where Arturo knew he was a person of consequence, to visit his home in Greenwich any time, any hour of day or night. The two men hovered over the table, vying with each other for the approval of these splendid influential women who were not flibbertigibbets but real guys, pals, people. They patted the pals on the back, dropped cigarette ashes and an occasional cinder down their bosoms, waved their drinks at perilous angles over their heads, shouted with resounding laughter over every word even before it had been said, were generously happy in the pleasure their company was surely giving. Frederick watched the innocent scene in the bar mirror, and speculated on how long this fine new friendship would last, and what would happen if the ladies really should appear sometime in the dead of night in Greenwich. One of the ladies waved to him, and he bowed gratefully, since he knew few people. Probably one of his students at the League.

He thought of Lyle waiting for him, reproached himself for not starting out sooner. Each morning his waking thought was "How soon will I see Lyle today?" but he was always late; wanting wings to fly to her he must always punish his desires with barriers of his own creation. He had promised to meet her at the Beckley's at ten but at ten he had been putting the last fond period to his manuscript. Then he had been obliged to think about clothes, an outrageous tax on the brain, to rummage for dress shirt and silk socks. Moths had embroidered their initials on the trousers of his dinner clothes, dress hose were in threads, so he had to switch back to tweeds. He found he had enough cash for his own carfare but not enough to be an evening's guest at a millionaire's house; that meant he had to find Murray. A burst of anger swept over him at the sheer inconvenience of being in love with Lyle, and at the demands her group made on him. Be on time. Dress. Be discreet for these are friends of my husband. Please take home all unescorted ladies, pay for the nightcap in the fine café they select, use your breakfast money on a check-room tip, walk home when your small funds give out. All for love. All for the incurable need of seeing Lyle whenever and wherever he could. How often he had rebelled at the bondage of his love, said goodbye forever, then rushed back to her sweet forgiving arms, begging for his chains. He had refused the easy teaching job in a Southern college, all for Lyle; and now the only way he could celebrate the completion of his work was to follow her to her own world and hope for a word with her. He would know no one there and be intensely uncomfortable, all for Lyle.

"But you ought to know Ephraim Beckley better, darling," she had said. "I don't expect you to like him, because nobody does, but after all he is a power, grandson of one of the great publishers. You ought to have a little scientific curiosity. You can't stay in another century every minute. It will do you good, darling. Ephraim spoke of you particularly!"

Frederick professed immense gratification at the compliment, adding that, for his part he always enjoyed being introduced to Ephraim Beckley and considered the Beckley amnesia in the presence of unknowns nothing short of genius.

"But he didn't realize you had written the Swan essays," Lyle said. "He probably thought it was only Swann's Way. He meets so many Prousts. Do come. Even if it's horrible it's something you ought to know. You do have to know the world, dear!"

So he must promise to meet her there, half annoyed and half touched by Lyle's transparent efforts to bring him out of his shell. She was always mistaking his retreat from life as loneliness that must be assuaged, or else she was chiding him for not liking people. She was wrong, he felt. People amused him, and safe in her arms he did not fear them. He wanted to be spectator, that was all, not actor; if possible he wanted a glass wall between him and other human beings and he was happy when Lyle joined him in the observation post, unhappy when she was on the other side of the glass. It made him uncomfortable when the actors addressed him, as if Myrna Loy should suddenly reach out of a moving picture to shake his hand. Still he would go where Lyle bade him, knowing he would hate it, knowing he would be unable to curb his misery at seeing her surrounded by admirers and belongers. Above all, he would be obliged to think about money. That was the thing that was always coming between himself and Lyle, the expense of being good to the rich. His own poverty never inconvenienced him; his ascetic tastes required little more than enough for dinner at Umberto's or the Chinaman's, coffee and a sandwich in Whelan's, a beer or two, a concert, a book. But no, for Lyle's sake, he must forage around trying to borrow money enough to visit or sup at some rich man's home, be prepared for the little accepted duties of Extra Man. "Be good to the rich." Why couldn't the rich mind their own business, divide expenses with each other, invite each other to dinner and feast on each other's fruity conversation? The truth was that they feared other rich might be richer than they were, a horrid thought, for if they are not the richest, what are they? So they must have artists, scientists, economists around them to feed their bleak minds and to verify their superiority; yes, yes, they are the richest, sing hosanna, and so far as they know are leading a cultural life as well, since the finest minds have been bemused by their cellar.

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Excerpted from The Locusts Have No King by Dawn Powell. Copyright © 1995 Steerforth Press Edition. Excerpted by permission of Steerforth Press.
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