Carnovsky's Retreat Read online

  It should also be mentioned that Catherine had taken the children and left him for a young man of nineteen, a roustabout. Now that she was close to thirty and Widmer in his late fifties, the thing had become unseemly to her and she reminded him that he had no legal connection to the children—that he was in fact the biological father of just one. (“Oh. ‘Just one, then,’ she expected me to say, I suppose.”)

  It never crossed Hal’s mind that he perhaps ought not return, that there might be other, better directions to take. He was certain Louise would forgive and welcome him back home; he only hoped she had maintained the boats and retrieved in good fettle his T.R. binoculars.

  Their life together had, after all, been rather perfect in his recollection. But Louise had different memories and, possessed of the facts, did not feel up to welcoming him home. In fact her initial impulse was “to kill him, to finish the job—that would keep things neat at least.”

  The insurance proceedings were closed to the public but the criminal fraud prosecution is just underway in New Haven Superior Court and Hal Prince (the name taken from Shakespeare’s Prince Hal, a rather more quixotic figure) has been playing to packed houses all week.

  And up in the remote, ornate balconies of this old Victorian pile, several spectators have been seen focussing binoculars on the leading man, admittedly a rare bird in any field.

  I have yet to find another word on this case anywhere in the library, so this constitutes the whole story so far as I know it. Maybe try the Connecticut papers. But I can explain this man and I will do so at my earliest. At the moment, I am going to organize my belongings, and doze.

  Moving out of the Bedbug Hilton, hoping the bedbugs stay put and don’t move with me. I was over there, the new room, once already today and the key worked. The place was empty, exactly empty like a barren plain. Okay so at least there is nothing bad in there—not a mouse, not a louse. (Until I take up occupancy.) But of course it will need a lot of things, I never stopped to realize. Bed, chair, table, at the minimum.

  So I thought of the basement in Brooklyn, where I have jammed in beds, chairs, tables, and more. All the extra furniture, decent enough some of it, and there it sits being wasted. Likewise I went to wondering if Tanya took the trouble to cancel the racing papers. A lot of dough if she didn’t, and subscriptions are the least of it. But I came to my senses, such as they are. What I am doing, what I did, is not good fiscal policy. Efficient it ain’t, nor practical in the slightest. No point worrying over the mailbox and the bills and what’s in the basement back there. Kiss it goodbye. Stop thinking and go buy a bed, only give it a good shake to make sure no bugs.

  Tuesday night. I’m in and very pleased with my new address. (Went mid-town for dinner in celebration.) All the comforts for fifteen a week, including my own tub and a plug-in hotplate for cooking. The dishes must be done in the bathroom sink but it’s not a big problem for a one-dish family like me. Also I like some sunlight inside the house and this one is blotted out by the apartment building behind. But what the hell, I can step outside for sunlight and the place is nice and cool on a doublebroiler day like today. So why quibble?

  I said that to Kramer once, why quibble, and he said Because you’re a Jew, Oscar. If you don’t quibble then no one will and we will lose track of the details. Maybe so but there is also the reverse—that you lose track of the Big Picture if you sit picking nits.

  I like being located close to the water. It’s a skip and a jump from here to Coentes Slip or over to Battery Park and I am in plain sight of the Brooklyn Bridge. I still have the smell of sea-water and the fresh fish-catch, along with the music of the tug-boats in the basin. From the roof of this building, not easily attained, I could see clear across to the Heights and maybe if I had Teddy Roosevelt’s binoculars with me I could look right in the window of my office and see Giselle in there trying to make some sense of the bookkeeping I left behind.

  You think of a Walkaway and you think Timbuktoo or the Himalayas, but it is not necessary. This is a big world and a big city. You can be a stranger three blocks from your house, because nobody leaves the neighborhood. My friends don’t cross the Bridge. Tanya did it twice in ten years, to my knowledge, and both times on my arm. This is another planet here, a world away, and I am not looking back over my shoulder anymore. I just go about my business.

  And Tanya I’m sure goes about hers. The weather is so good and the Dodgers are headed for the World Series, and between the Hadassah and her dancing I can’t help thinking Tanya must be well. Maybe even glad to have me out of there.

  With Widmer they all talk about the money he had, the big connections, the pretty girl. It’s all beachfronts and mountaintops and fun in the sun with a highpowered dinghy. Not one bit are they fazed by what this guy did—that he could lift off without a sound. He slipped the traces, flew the coop, and never said a mumbling word. Do they think this is normal? Do they believe it’s easy?

  Clothes on the dock. It wouldn’t fool a little boy with a plastic detectives kit. And now they think that the point of the story is that he left on account of a girl. What else is new? That’s also why he came back, when it was finished with the girl.

  They leave all the time, every day, because of Blondie. A little strange leg and it’s lights out America. But they agonize about it. They sweat and confess and after they do battle-royal they always settle up the money. What they do not do is drop a nice outfit, slacks and a sweater, on the dock and tip-toe through the tulips to Saint Pete. That’s crazy stuff. And that is the point.

  But I can explain this man. First off of course he did settle up. He left plenty behind, made the arrangements. He did not choose to consult the wife about it, and that’s a doctor for you every time. He figures there’s no need to put anything to a vote when he is always in the know. This particular doctor, however, is also ashamed of himself. Proud of himself I’m sure, very cock-of-the walk with a smooth little backside in his bed, yet ashamed before the world. And before he will suffer the world’s opinion he would rather erase himself from the record.

  This can happen when you get too high up. Everyone must sooner or later drop down in class—a baseball great, movie queen—must take the backward step and it hurts. There’s a poem about it that you read in high school, to the athlete dying young. Either you die young or you die going downhill from your prime, that’s the story. Pay the nickel and take the choice.

  But Doctor won’t choose. He wants to eat his cake and have it too. He must be “dead” in order to keep his place up there on the pedestal he made for himself. So he appoints himself the silver-haired hero of the funeral and leaves everyone happy he could die so well-born.

  The man spent his time making a reputation. Now he wants to make a life but can’t waste the work he put in on the reputation. A charming man they all agree, I’m sure in Savannah too.

  I shouldn’t have to worry if I get a little bout of homesick because freedom means I can board the boat for Spain early tomorrow, or take the parachute jump at Coney Island without a parachute if I prefer it that way. But it also means I could go to my old house, sit down on my chair in the living room, and take a look at the sports page. If that’s where freedom takes me. You don’t want to stop yourself in life—let something else stop you. (For example, Tanya might say Get lost, as Mrs. Wid did, but that would be for her to decide.)

  As far as the parachute jump at Steeplechase Park, I never took a notion even with the parachute. Not for me. Put my life in the hands of a bag of wind? When my dear nephew Walter asked me to take him up, I was very relieved his old man nixed it. Saved me admitting I would never. (Uncles must stand for adventure.)

  Completed interior decorating today with a nice brass lamp—standup kind—from the flea market on Bowling Green. A package of two light bulbs at the hardware cost me the same money as the lamp did. Figure that one.

  Figure this one too, a new vice to report. Two nights back I got an eyeful of my girl neighbor across the alleyway, and then last night the same
again. And it is as they say: the Devil made me do it the first time but the second time I did it on my own. Let the record show I looked.

  Saturday night, so what? I feel like I should be on to something and I’m not even close. If I was home we would eat, the two of us or possibly in a restaurant with Morris and the Mrs., and then we would walk and talk (if Morris then politics, if the two of us then family) and afterwards settle down to the business of bed.

  So what does a single man do? Prowl the city like an alleycat? Bowl a few strings and wash down the week’s dust at a tavern? Maybe. Or sit home and say So what, and wait till his neighbor gets ready for beddie.

  They say the last one to know he is crazy is always the crazy man himself. He feels sharp as a tack, sees it all clearly, like a newborn genius. That’s me to a tee. I can feel my brain waking up. I am seeing the world in a new way—and I don’t mean Seeing the World like from the Eiffel Tower or London Bridge, I mean seeing it right here under my own nose where it’s always been. And if they told me I was crazy I would definitely refuse to believe them. If they came to reel me in, the men in the white suits, I would kick and scream and tell them Hands off the newborn genius.

  All right, tonight’s subject is Oscar Fish, a new man in town. Who is this Fish?

  It’s me of course—I am Fish. It’s the phony name I gave, my nom de guerre or de plume, whatever. It’s a little bit for hiding behind, naturally, but also for fun. Brooklyn is across the water but it is not across the water like Paris is and supposing a detective did come over to Manhattan, suppose he did nothing more brilliant than browse around with his index finger on the rooming-house logbooks, or crummy hotels like The Bedbug Hilton? He might take the trouble.

  Or suppose he has friends and sets their ears to the tune “Carnovsky,” tells them Give me a bang on the telephone if you happen to catch these syllables. It could happen. Fish is the precaution.

  A new life rates a new name in any case. Hal Prince got one. So did Pierce, the man in the detective story, which I must put in soon. They keep the names simple for two reasons—easy to remember (for you) and hard to notice (for them). Who minds a Prince or a Pierce?

  Of course you have the license, be anyone you want. Just keep a straight face when you say it. So do I want to be an eye-talian tonight? Whoops, I am Dino Rinaldi. A Greco? Make me Spyros Skyros. Or polish your teeth, paint on a pencil-thin moustache, and watch out for Clark Hutton, Leading Man. The self-named man.

  I considered putting hair on my face, add a beard and look like the ancestors. You can hide behind a nice bushy beard, like the ones on the cough-drop boys. Buy Fish Brothers Cough-Drops, they stick to your beard! But in the end no new hair and just the name of Fish. It fits somehow.

  Good to be comfy with a new name, to feel it belongs with you, and if you are changing over at an advanced age this is no easy proposition. Fish came to me from the neighborhood, it’s no great inspiration, just short and easy to say. You couldn’t argue with it the way you might argue with Katzenjammer Junior or Burlingame the Fourth. It’s silly but quick off the tongue: Fish, like a fact unvarnished.

  Oscar Fish, I say, and I even believe it myself. Because it’s over before you can argue, perfectly real.

  Tonight I will enter into the record the tale of Flitcraft (Pierce), a good one, from the detective book. And credit to my friend Mrs. Kearney at the library desk who had it in mind when I first asked about the topic and then went and located it. How wonderful to recall something from a book read years ago. I never could.

  A man named Flitcraft had left his real-estate office, in Tacoma, to go to luncheon one day and had never returned. He did not keep an engagement to play golf after four that afternoon, though he had taken the initiative in making the engagement less than half an hour before he went out to luncheon. His wife and children never saw him again. His wife and he were supposed to be on the best of terms. He had two children, boys, one five and the other three. He owned his house in a Tacoma suburb, a new Packard, and the rest of the appurtenances of successful American living.

  Flitcraft had inherited seventy thousand dollars from his father and, with his success in real estate, was worth something in the neighborhood of two hundred thousand dollars at the time he vanished. His affairs were in order, though there were enough loose ends to indicate that he had not been setting them in order preparatory to vanishing. A deal that would have brought him an attractive profit, for instance, was to have been concluded the day after the one on which he disappeared. There was nothing to suggest that he had more than fifty or sixty dollars in his immediate possession at the time of his going.

  He went like that, like a fist when you open your hand.

  That was in 1922. In 1927 I was with one of the big detective agencies in Seattle. Mrs. Flitcraft came in and told us somebody had seen a man in Spokane who looked a lot like her husband. I went over there. It was Flitcraft all right. He had been living in Spokane for a couple of years as Charles Pierce. He had an automobile business that was netting him twenty or twenty-five thousand a year, a wife, a baby son, owned his own home in a Spokane suburb, and usually got away to play golf after four in the afternoon during the season.

  Here’s what happened to him. Going to lunch he passed an office-building that was being put up—just the skeleton. A beam or something fell eight or ten stories down and smacked the sidewalk alongside him. It brushed pretty close to him, but didn’t touch him, though a piece of the sidewalk glanced off his cheek. He was scared stiff of course, he said, but he was more shocked than really frightened. He felt like somebody had taken the lid off life and let him look at the works.

  He, the good-citizen-husband-father, could be wiped out between office and restaurant by the accident of a falling beam. He knew then that men die at haphazard like that, and lived only while blind chance spared them.

  It was not, primarily, the injustice of it that disturbed him: he accepted that after the first shock. What disturbed him was the discovery that in sensibly ordering his affairs he had gone out of step, and not into step, with life. He said he knew before he had gone twenty feet from the fallen beam that he would never know peace again until he had adjusted himself to this new glimpse of life. By the time he had eaten his luncheon he had found the means of adjustment. Life could be ended for him at random by a falling beam: he would change his life at random by simply going away.

  He went to Seattle that afternoon and from there by boat to San Francisco. For a couple of years he wandered around and then drifted back to the Northwest, and settled in Spokane and got married. His second wife didn’t look like the first, but they were more alike than different. You know, the kind of woman that play fair games of golf and bridge and like new salad-recipes. He wasn’t sorry for what he had done. It seemed reasonable enough to him. I don’t think he even knew he had settled back naturally into the same groove he had jumped out of in Tacoma. But that’s the part of it I always liked. He adjusted himself to beams falling, and then no more of them fell, and he adjusted to them not falling.

  And that’s Flitcraft, not exactly a sentimental fellow. He leaves behind the beloved country club, and a wife should never be surprised, but I am interested that these men can leave behind their children. A child expects so much, it’s a piece of his heart every time you disappoint him. I believe that for me a child would alter the matter.

  Of course I haven’t got one and not only that—I was never nicked by a steel beam or rolled in the hay by a cute little blonde either.

  Quiet morning with newspapers, noisy afternoon at Belmont Park. Found just one race worth playing all day, an absolute certainty which got there very late, by a nose hair. I was sure we got photoed out until they put the number up. They forgave me all my misconceptions and handed me the money.

  Flitcraft’s story reminded me very much of a couple of things that happened to me recently. Trivial matters, nothing along the lines of a steel beam, but I’ll put them in the record.

  Last winter I was coming do
wn the access road to the loading dock, the steep part where the pavement is always rutted with ice so you go very slow, taking baby steps and yet all of a sudden my feet fly right up in my face. A flash of magic, like a film with a few frames cut out in the middle. Walking and carefully, but before I know it I am upside down in the air ass-over-teakettle and seeing my shoe-tops. The crash landing woke up my ass-bone forever and cracked the left elbow for good measure.

  I was kayoed pretty good. The shock of flying and the shock of landing makes your stomach light and I just sat there awhile, first confused and then hurting. And when I regained a few of my senses, I confess my first move was to check and see were there any witnesses to this humiliation. Relieved to see none, but I stayed down for the count and got a little thinking done right there on the ground. I can’t say exactly what I thought, or what I concluded—maybe what fools we are so easily shown to be as in our presumed dignity we parade, something along these lines.

  But reading Flitcraft transported me right back there. I could feel the cold coming through the seat of my pants just as though I was still sitting and thinking. Flitcraft got a real scare, his life was threatened, but I got a scare too. Not so dramatic of course. In fact the reverse—I felt like an idiot, a clumsy fool, and so it took me longer than just “luncheon” to put the matter straight in my head. Nonetheless I concluded that my life was threatened too and it was this experience, along with one other, that gave me a good kick.

  So you never know which are the small matters and which are large. Because the other one is even smaller, non-existing, could not be a more trivial moment in any man’s life—and yet it did a job on me. Also last winter on a Tuesday so things were dead at the office, nothing coming in, nothing going out, and the phone is just a black lump on the desk. I puff on a Gonzales to stay awake and look over what’s up at Hialeah. Kill time. A day like that when Walter was little I might grab him for a few hours, take him around. Or eat a sandwich with Benny Herz, who’s not so busy himself these days.