Lucinderella, p.13
Lucinderella, page 13
There was no sweat on Dr. Crit’s chin, or stubble either, I noticed when he came back to the Trust Department from the door and lowered himself on one knee in front of me, the only male except Bennie, but his glasses were steamy and I think he was getting impatient also. He said, staring me in the eye, “Now listen to me, Bud. I want the combination and I want it now.”
I said, “I don’t know the combination, I haven’t got it.”
“You’ve got part of it. Give me what you’ve got.”
I said, “I work at the hotel, Dr. Crit. Don’t you remember me——”
And if you please, he put the gun on the rug and slapped me across the mouth with the hand.
“Don’t fool with me, son. Who else’s got the combination but the manager?”
“I just don’t know, sir. I don’t work here. I work at the hotel like I said, the Jonathan——”
“What you doing here then?”
“Well, sir, I just came to bring my Cousin Lucy because this was her first day on the job and she didn’t know anybody and——”
“Search this man.”
Bennie said, “He-ain’t-got-it-ain’t-nobody-got-it-but-the-manager-and-he-ain’t-got-but-half-Mr.-Roop-got-rest,” said it so fast it was all out before Dr. Crit could say, “Shut up!”
Number Two had come in from the back with Mary O’Connor and Mrs. Anderson, both taped, and he searched me, dumping everything I had out on the rug until it looked like a trash pile; I didn’t want him to take my money (it was a long way to Friday) but I didn’t want him to throw it down like junk either. He smelled scared, or somebody did. I don’t know what Crit was looking for, he certainly didn’t think I had the combination in my pocket; I think he was getting tense with waiting and had to do something, because he turned on Mrs. Anderson before she could get her girdle comfortable from sitting so low and said, “Write the combination, get going,” holding out a memo pad from Mr. Roop’s desk and a Farmers Bank pencil, then did the same thing with Mary O’Connor, getting tighter all the time. Then he turned on Number Three in a burst of misogyny and told him to get these women the hell out of there. “Take ’em downstairs. Keep ’em there. Stay with ’em,” Lucy rolling over on her two hands and up in one limber bottoms-up motion (no back trouble this morning it seemed).
As they moved off he said, “Now you, Porter,” pushing himself round on his knee to Bennie. “Don’t hand me a lot of fast talk, just tell me what I want to know and don’t tell me anything else. Does the manager come in the back door or the front?”
Bennie said, “Back-him-and-Mr.-Roop-both-they-generally-come-together-just-about-due-now——”
“Get on the back door,” he said to Number Two who was poking round in my trash pile and not even bothering to take anything. “When they come tape ’em, bring ’em to me. Move out, leave that stuff alone” (stuff!) standing up and bringing his face into the sun-stripes, which hit him like a short circuit: a couple of high-pitched exasperated obscenities and “GET THAT BLIND SHUT!” while I was almost wishing they had taped my mouth, a grunt popping out of me as if he had punched me in the stomach though nobody cared, with Crit changing his mind, “I’ll do it! I’ll do it! Get on the door,” and laying his gun on Mr. Roop’s blotless blotter and throwing us all into a sudden dimness with a snatch at the cord, mumbling and grumbling complaints about the half-assed help you had to rely on nowadays as if we could sympathize.
Things seemed to quiet down then. In a few minutes Number Two brought in Roy Shadwick (Notes and Mortgages) and after him four of the girls in pairs like doves, all the girls mouth-taped and giving you a creepy feeling to see four of them and not hear a word; he left Roy with us and sent the girls down the stairs to Number Three, determined but considerate too, as you might add some valuable broilers to the henhouse. Crit leaned on the partition of the Trust Department, dividing his attention between us on the floor and what I knew by his mean stare was the bank clock over the vault though I couldn’t see it from where I was. Once, through the opening, I saw Number Three’s dark glasses rise up to floor level like a skin diver as if he weren’t too happy having Crit and Number Two up here with all the currency and him down there with nothing but girls; Crit waved him down and he resubmerged.
Then all of a sudden everything started jumping like a pinball machine. The setup at that moment was: Crit watching the clock over the vault; Number Three downstairs with the girls; Number Two at the stairhead from sending down another pair (our bank looks like a nunnery) and glancing out at Crit in the lobby and at the stagnation in general I suppose. The glance must have given him a clear view of the front door, because that did it.
He pops away from the steps, pointing straight-armed, and Crit looks round, snaps out like a spring and goes galloping up the rubber floor. Both the manager and Mr. Roop have their noses mashed out white against the glass, hands round their eyes like kids trying to see into a haunted house, probably thinking the signal is an accident or a drill because there has never been any bank trouble in our town in two hundred and thirty-one years, but wanting to check it. They both see Crit coming at the same time, both yelp, both break and run, Crit after them and Number Two after Crit, through the big front door and outside between the Dorics, the big door swinging shut behind them and the big brass oily responsible bolt sliding in with a solid click, and Crit turning back at the sound and grabbing the imperturbable handle and banging on the glass with his fist for Number Three to climb the hell up there and open it, who can’t hear a thing for being downstairs with the girls, and getting no action (except maybe a puzzled frown from Officer Gepfert out under the light, the traffic clogging up nicely now) and banging the pistol butt through the plate glass so he can reach the inside latch and setting off all the bells in the bank like a sprinkling system (and, he knew very well, in Police Barracks too), and in a fit of temper firing two disgusted thwarted exasperated fast shots into what plate glass was left and jumping down the steps and headfirst into the car at the curb which guns away through Gepfert’s screaming whistle with Number Two half in the door and thrown in the rest of the way when they take the corner, and Number Three downstairs with the girls—a Michigan boy, according to Lucy, and very obliging, untaping the wrists of Mary O’Connor because she was nervous and wanted to get at her rosary to say a prayer (think one, because he wouldn’t untape her mouth), the boy getting nervous too, with time going by, to say nothing of prayer going up, which he couldn’t read but could be pretty sure had nothing in it for him, and backing at last to the closed door, keeping them all under his eye, and opening it on seven policemen piling down the stairs (Lucy’s figure and no doubt exaggerated—there might have been three).
It was amazing how many holdups took place that morning, overlapping here and there, crisscrossing, a few things in common, more than two robbers and fewer than six, and a pretty solid agreement that all of them had two arms (the closest to anything different was Lucy’s statement that one of them kept you covered with a second gun drawn on you in the pocket of his coat—very gratifying to Uncle Otis who could understand my mistaking the man for Dr. Crit under such trying circumstances but couldn’t begin to accept it, telling me—as if it vindicated Crit—that he had just been reading of six half-normal-size hens bred at a Western college which could maintain normal egg production on forty percent less feed). Some had it that Bennie Low, knowing the signal, had closed the blinds himself and by the time he got his bonus—a week’s pay for everybody in recognition of gallantry, including Lucy of course but not me (I wasn’t supposed to be there any more than the robbers, and the police were beginning to connect me with them when Uncle Otis arrived and claimed me)—by the time Bennie got his bonus he was starting to wonder if he had closed them; some had it that the runner which Mrs. Anderson got in her stocking when they sat her down on the floor had come as she fought off an “Attempt”; and of course it was generally accepted that the turning point of the whole nightmare was Number Three’s prodigious stupidity in letting Mary O’Connor get to her rosary which was like handing her a walkie-talkie beamed straight at headquarters. As Uncle Otis had said on our trip down to Ferguson, it was going to be hard to know exactly what happened until Lucy told us—went in the darkroom, ran it all through the developer and the acid fixing bath and fixed it; which meant we might never know.
A little of the rest of it we were able to put together, from people who had nearly been run over in town or smashed up on the superhighway: it seemed for a few minutes in there that our Miracle Mile had performed an extra miracle and trapped Dr. Crit, as if materialism was quite able to protect itself. The smoke-smog-fog of the new chimneys, which that morning had settled mostly over the river, began to rise at about the time Crit closed the blinds and by the time he took off it was spilling over the levee and through the streets and it slowed him down, slowed down all the new industrial traffic, which slowed him again. He dodged and swerved and squealed his tires into streets and alleys he hadn’t thought necessary to case and before he could find the highway (no mean piece of navigation under the best conditions, as I have explained) he was so smogged and turned round that he took the north ramp instead of the south and was out over the bridge and passing a dim but cheery “Welcome to South Carolina” before he knew where he was. He naturally wanted to keep all this a simple Georgia matter and, spotting a break in the opposite lanes between a trailer van rushing us some automobiles and an oil tanker rushing us some fuel for them, he had his man plow across the median and headed back. In a couple of minutes he rolled down the north ramp into the smog again and, like Big Ma’s bathroom key, just vanished. Our police alerted everybody in all directions and by afternoon he was reported in North Carolina, Florida and Alabama, but the only report that seemed worth thinking about came from a taxi driver in town who said a man of his description had inquired how the hell he could get to the south ramp. The taxi driver told him, as well as anybody could, handing out one of Madam Ace’s cards as he usually did—an Ace of Hearts, with the address—which the man threw into the traffic as they screeched away. We didn’t know whether it was Crit or not; people are asking all the time for one ramp or the other. The police checked to the south but to no purpose, beyond picking up a one-armed man at the Florida line who said he was an itinerant preacher and proved conclusively that he was.
Anyhow, none of it was the sort of thing Lucy had worked with before and I doubted if we would ever get the straight of it. When she said as we left the bank, “My God, I didn’t mean that real,” and refused to go near it again (even for her bonus, which they mailed her—rather Old School of them when they could have skipped it), I thought she would reach for a typewriter forthwith; but she didn’t. Dr. Zyggy’s adjustments stood the strain. What she did forthwith was take a job in the Tax Receiver’s office at the courthouse, which Lester told her about behind the back of his hand (on the q.t. as usual) and which I believe she associated with the good doctor’s advice about going into politics.
2
Of course there was another angle to Lucy’s being there that bothered me more than this, quite a different angle. Her being there at all, in fact—in and out, seen and unseen, spoken to and unspoken to, until I realized that even her almost soundless footstep was not like anybody else’s soundlessness, and I saw that I was working up my courage to go to Uncle Otis at the first right time and say something along the lines of “a man has to think of his future, Uncle Otis, look ahead a bit, wife, family, a few down payments and carrying charges, frankly, sir, Lucinda and I want to get married, you are the first to know, and the question is just where do I stand at the Jonathan Copp? What are my prospects? I’ll need a little raise of course, about thirty percent,” and so on, along those lines. I got a nice check in my box every Friday and, thanks to Papa Charles’ pre-eminent foresight—to say nothing of our staff table in the dining room—had been able to put a good part of it by, but it wouldn’t be enough to swing what was now usurping my mind because The Homestead would be out for us under the No-doubling-up Paragraph as it was for Savannah (Big Ma-and-Dahlonega was special and didn’t count and nobody thought of the twins as two). It was a delicate decision, whether to push through first with Uncle Otis and then face a possibly cool Lucinda or push through with Lucy to a cool Uncle Otis; I couldn’t put it to either one of an “if/as/when” basis. Leaving it to chance is not a habit I recommend but I had tried it before and after all you can’t make things do just what you want them to and you have to compromise and improvise and iron while the iron is hot and I thought I would talk to whichever one our Presbyterian wind saw fit to first blow before me.
Which seemed to be Lucy because one of the things she wanted most after our pistol-point morning, our tapes and restraints (kept wanting, day after day), was a sight, she said, of some country, some untaped, unrestrained, open country, and I asked the Judge one afternoon if I could borrow The Bungalow for the evening, which he was glad to consent to, handing me the keys.
The Judge retreated to The Bungalow on occasion, just short I suspect of being overwhelmed by Homestead companionship; a pond on the place, a pair of swans and such things, lots of trees. The former owner had operated a still on the creek above the pond and when the Government got to where it couldn’t stand the competition any longer the Judge, in practice at the time, had argued the case for him, lost and, I take it, bought the property in to help the man, who wouldn’t be needing it for a while. He put up a sort of forest-ranger’s tower on it, the four channel irons rising up rigid out of concrete through the limbs and foliage of his woods, a stairway sloping up from corner to corner getting tighter all the time in the lacy taper, two platforms on the way with benches where you could catch your breath, a pleasant breezy place on a starry night—if you were a good sailor, because with the branches moving all round you and below like a deep and black-green sea you didn’t have to be afflicted with much imagination to find yourself bracing your feet and leaning to port and starboard and holding on to whatever came to hand not to be pitched overboard on the swell. Or to whomever, which in this case for Lucy was me; just a tight grab round the arm, nothing personal in it but still a warm contact that set me thinking as we looked out over the waves for a passing ship or a lighthouse beacon, swaying together on the motionless motion. Not much wind but surely, I felt, the Presbyterian one I had been waiting for.
She was saying how much better she liked the courthouse job than the bank (Lester had already introduced her and it was evidently in the bag—“the political job,” she insisted on calling it), how much she liked the generous way in which they hired as many people as possible instead of as few, how much safer she felt to look up and see the high shoes of the High Sheriff on the desk across the hall, everybody so Southern and polite and easy to take. “Oh, it will be so nice, Clamp, when Yankees are all Southerners too, and now that they want to swap all these factories and things for our colored people it won’t be long before everybody has a pleasant voice and is polite and easy. I never dreamed they also wanted to stop segregating industry——”
“Lucy,” I said, breaking it off, “there’s something I’ve been meaning to tell you. It’ll be no surprise to you of course, somebody who can see ahead and behind and on all sides at the same time the way you can” (a little afraid of seeming too serious).
She said, “That’s just the trouble,” and when I asked her what was, not liking the way she said it, she said, “The truth is, Clamp, I see too much. I see the heart right out of everything. The heart’s only there in chiaroscuro. If you look too close it’s gone, like a name if you try to remember.”
I said, “Now, Lucy,” the way the Judge used to speak to his trotting horse with the train coming in.
“It’s appalling what goes on in this house, if you ‘see.’”
“In The Homestead? Nothing ‘goes on,’ Lucy-honey.”
“Do you need a diagram, Clint? Do you want me to spell it for you?”
“No, but I just don’t know what you ‘see.’”
“Oh, Jessica and the Judge——”
I said, “Lucy, Jessie’s got the soft eye on Dr. Steel, honey, the preacher.”
“And where does she sleep in the meantime?” I said anyhow the Judge was too old for that sort of carrying-on and she said he wasn’t dead, was he? and I said, “Oh Lucy!” It was so absurd, so bookish and unreal. But she went right on. “And all the rest. Uncle Brownell and his fancy lady that Bivins saw. And Stanley and Lester.” It raised the hair on your head. I said, “Lucy, honey, you’re way, way too——”
“And you and the twins.”
“Me and the twins! Honey, I never even look at the twins.”
“That proves it.”
“Proves what?”
“You ask Zyggy when you go.”
“But I never look at Big Ma either.”
“And in addition to all that, Bivins trying to get Uncle Brownell out of the Captain’s Quarters exactly like the Communists trying to undermine the USA. Shooting Laban to save Mamie like Russia finishing off Hitler bent on raping civilization. And all the smaller lodgers banding together and being stronger than either and keeping both in line——”
“Good God, Lucy!”
“And the whole place like the United Nations with everybody trying to get in.”
“Lucy!”
“And the race is not to the swift nor the battle to the strong, because there’s nothing weaker than a mighty nation. It doesn’t dare lift a finger, kicked in the teeth, insulted, slandered, no matter what, it can’t do a thing, powerless in the face of scattered reason and good sense——”
“But, Lucy, that’s not The Homestead, honey. You’re just over-seeing it, the way you used to do when you were book-writing and went to the doctor.”
“The small tenants have the big ones immobilized, scared to death—of what? Of words, Cliff! That’s the wonderful thing. They don’t want to be called ugly names because they have such big feelings to be hurt.”
