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Prior to his bereavement, Mike, of course, had been toying with a novel. Its central incident, the only one he had so far addressed, was the mission, over the lines, of a flight of two Allied SPADs, on the last morning of the War.

  It was a story he had heard, on the boat home, as others had heard of the Angel of Mons; the Christmas Truce; the Hun and the Yank, bayonets locked in each other, conjoined, dead and frozen in No Man’s Land; and the other myths, truths, and revelations of the Trench War.

  The Armistice had been signed on November 10, and hostilities were to cease on the next day: the eleventh day of the eleventh month, at the eleventh hour.

  If this nicety were not enough to establish the gulf between the aesthetics of the general staff and those of the men dying in anguish, a further directive was amended. “No unit or individual is to cease from combat until the hour of the Armistice. All plans and objectives contained herein will be executed with maximum effort until the cessation of hostilities.”

  The order was received, at the Front, with incredulity by the men, many of whom had fought for four years and needed only to hold still for an hour or two in order to return home safe. Some units’ commanders chose to disregard the order; some, generally understood to be the careerists, hoping for one more victory, formed their men up and attacked across No Man’s Land into the machine guns defending territory which was already, by treaty, to become theirs at eleven a.m.

  An army colonel, Mike wrote, was pestered by the newly arrived son of an acquaintance. The colonel permitted the boy to fly his one combat mission in the last two hours of the War.

  A veteran pilot, Mike’s hero, was told, “Take him out, let him strafe some empty hillside, bring him back; I’ll consider it a favor.” The pilot told the rookie, “Do what I do: when I wag my wings, strafe the ‘enemy area’ that I fire at. Empty your guns, and follow me back to the field.”

  They took off, formed up, and flew east. The pilot spotted a small, empty wood, some miles ahead. He got the young boy’s attention and signed to him to follow his lead. The veteran turned in and strafed the copse, which was not empty, but held a half company of German artillery, sitting out the War’s last half hour.

  The Germans were lounging against the trees when the first plane dove. Some stood to wave. The plane’s fire killed most of the company. The survivors unlimbered their gun and blew the second plane out of the sky.

  The veteran turned back to see his wingman’s plane in pieces, the dead boy pilot falling free.

  Mike’s story turned on the loathing of the hero for the colonel, who had let the boy fly, and of the hero for himself, as he, however inadvertently, had caused the boy’s death. The story’s hero returned to Chicago, but as many times as Mike rewrote the Armistice Day Incident, the story would progress no further.

  And then Mike realized that he had gone beyond what was permitted: for his continual revision of the novel’s first chapter had, beyond question, called the attention of the Fates, and in response to his summons, they had killed the girl, enlisting his help.

  “Well,” Mike thought, “most of ’em died stalled and spinning in the Jenny, or died when the engine quit, or got shot up by the Hun, or flew it into the ground. An infant got her head bashed in by a drunken fool with a croquet ball.

  “And when the Eternal Scorer,” he thought, “puts his mark against my name, ’twill matter not if won or lost . . . For all, no doubt, will be forgiven, forgotten, or misremembered, certainly. But what of the plight of the Eternal Scorer?”

  No, the great crime, as his mind ran, was the unspeakable nicety of the world that could not simply declare, “The Armistice has been concluded, hostilities have ceased.”

  “And perhaps in some world,” he thought, “the girl is still alive.” And the thought comforted him and he believed it, for the half moment, until taken over by the ensuing question, “But how would one get to that world?”

  He could not. And it was difficult for him to frequent the Sally Port and its sympathy, however expressed. But he was comfortable at the Ace of Spades.

  Chapter 16

  Morris Teitelbaum had been shot to death and nobody cared. “News Around Town” noted that his congregation and his widow were dedicating the synagogue’s new recreation room in his honor.

  Also reported were several nuptials of the working poor and the projected arrival in Chicago of a new British consul. These were at the bottom of page 12. The front page carried a notice of a visit to Chicago of a flight of Italian airmen.

  Mike read the front page, and Peekaboo read “Ask Miss Fisk.”

  “Says here,” she said, “way to bring your man home is: go take the kids to work.” She shook her head in wonder.

  They sat in the whorehouse kitchen and drank. The piano player played “Frivolous Sal” as if stating a philosophic proposition. Mike knew he would be sitting crosswise, on the piano bench, his overcoat and hat on, a cigarette stuck to his lip, and sipping the end-of-the-day rye from the tumbler Peekaboo always brought him to help him home.

  The sound filtered into the kitchen, where she sat with Mike.

  “Pal,” he said, “you’re a good commander.”

  She shrugged. They listened as the man played, dead slow, the perfect ragtime. It was the sound of a broken heart.

  Dolly, the last girl down, was at the sink, drinking a glass of water. She let out a long sigh. Peekaboo held an arm out, and the girl put the glass down and came over. Peekaboo gave her a hug. “How you feelin’?” she said.

  The girl looked at Mike and leaned down and kissed Peekaboo on the top of the head. Mike smiled at her. “Dolly, you get some rest,” Peekaboo said.

  The girl retrieved her glass of water and left the kitchen. Mike spoke the lyrics to the music: “A wild Irish devil, but dead on the level, was my gal Sal.”

  “Well, that’s the crackerjack prize,” Peekaboo said, “that’s the truth. Someone will stick by you.” But she saw Mike was far away.

  The song stopped. Mike heard the man close the keyboard cover. He heard the bench pushed back, and followed the man’s footsteps toward the door. He felt he would have given anything for the song to continue.

  There was a muttered goodbye as the door opened and closed. He heard Marcus bolt it shut, and then the man was gone.

  He looked at Peekaboo.

  “There’s only one known cure for a broken heart,” she said, “it’s time; and that don’t work.

  “If it worked, you see, it wu’nt be a broken heart, but just, ‘you got your feelings hurt.’ So you have to assess,” she said, “your remaining assets. Older you get, the more experienced, which is to say heartbroke, or fucked up and fucked over, the more conservative you find yourself, anything good: ‘How did I get here?,’ ‘How can I hold on to it, and what will I do when it’s done?’

  “Young girl does that, they call her ‘mercantile,’” she said. “That’s how they act on Lake Shore Drive. Girls here? I have to train them, I can, to instill in them the sense well-brought-up white girls schooled to practice from birth.

  “You, all caught up in ‘love,’ so on, no wise disposed to consider someday it might end. You do that, it ain’t ‘love,’ which is, we know, a form of madness.”

  Mike nodded. Peekaboo spread her hands to say, Well, what else would it be?

  “‘Someday, I’m gon’ be old,’ the debutante may understand, but her mama surely knows it; and she better, she’s young and slim, drag some fellow, as the song says, to ‘the hitching post.’

  “Her mama knows, the juices flowing, she’s gon’ get fucked in the summerhouse by someone—hope to God it ain’t the gardener, but some fellow, they gon’ make him pay. May be they in love. That’s fine, too. More likely, the girl, her mama, thinking of the future; the boy, now, he’s gettin’ married, he’s thinking of the future, too. The future, him, is, marry the girl, fulfill his duty, he might like her. Like her or not, he’s got the money, he’s still gon’ be coming here, three times a month, he found that out on his honeymoon. />
  “And he might have been to France.”

  Mike smiled.

  “Tell me about them French girls,” she said. “Go on.”

  Mike shook his head.

  “Oh, yeah, they perfect, ’cause they live in memory,” Peekaboo said. “You turn it upside down, you never, the Irish girl, got to see her, screaming at you, she’s right, you’re wrong, and you the madder for it. Or getting old, or with the kids, or . . . I say yes. You mourning for something got torn from you; however much you two was in love, it had to, over time, you see, diminish, and ‘give way to Worldly Cares.’ Some extent. But you can’t know that, how could you?”

  Mike rose, and put his hand into his pocket.

  “That for Dolly?” Peekaboo asked.

  “For Dolly, yes,” Mike said.

  “Yeah, well, you know,” Peekaboo said, “that girl likes you.” Mike took a bill, and handed it to Peekaboo.

  “Yeah, I can talk to her,” Mike said.

  Mike had spent the end of the slow evening and all of the subsequent night with Dolly. Everyone in the Ace, of course, knew Mike’s story, and knew of his grief, and they treated him well.

  He lay on the bed, in the middle of the night, he kicked off the covers and walked to the dresser. He looked back at Dolly in bed. He nodded at her, and at the bottle on the bureau.

  “Yes, please,” she said.

  He poured two drinks.

  He pointed at the compact on the bureau. The compact was open, and it showed full of cocaine. Dolly shook her head.

  Also on the bureau was a small framed photograph. It showed ten smiling adolescents, in their Sunday clothes; and, at the end of the line, the black preacher. Each of the children held a rolled diploma—all were smiling. All were black save one slight white girl at the end of the line. The photo was marked Confirmation Class, 1916, AME Church, Benton Harbor, Michigan.

  Mike looked at the photo.

  “You in there?” he said. She nodded.

  “Who’s the white girl?” Mike said.

  “Ain’t no white girl,” Dolly said.

  “Which one are you?” Mike said.

  “You full of questions,” she said.

  “Alright, ask me one,” Mike said.

  “Tell me about your white girl,” she said.

  “What have I been doing all night?” Mike said.

  While Mike was dressing, Dolly went down to the kitchen, crying. She told the story, and was comforted by Peekaboo, who corrected her complaint.

  “It ain’t ‘men,’ it ain’t even ‘white men,’” Peekaboo said, “but, you might say, it’s human nature. Rare, rare is the person, you’ve known them long enough, you won’t see them do something cruel, usually to you. Plus, what the hell you doing, get involved with the customers?

  “Yeah, I learned, early on,” Peekaboo said softly, “let them pay, here, to enjoy doing what they resent there. But they got to pay. Y’ever forget that, gonna be trouble.”

  “What they resent ‘there’—‘there’ being?” Mike said. Both women looked at the door as Mike entered.

  “At they home,” Peekaboo said.

  Mike stood at the back door, straightening his tie. “And what is it that they resent?” Mike said.

  “Curious thing,” Peekaboo said. “The men, they’re courting you, all the ‘yes, ma’am’ in the world is insufficient, they get your panties off. Here, they ain’t no question. But, this being a Better House, they enjoy, independent, treating the girls with respect. That is the curious thing. Here? They enjoy treating a girl well, after they fucked her.

  “Yu-huh,” Peekaboo said. “People think I’m selling pussy. They wife’s got a pussy. No. I’m selling something else.”

  “What brought that up?” Mike said.

  “First rule I ever learned, I was coming up, was make ’em take their hat off. No, that’s a lie.”

  “What was the first rule?”

  “First rule,” Peekaboo said, “don’t sell the same virgin to the same man twice. That’s why you got to have a turnover in girls, you ever wondered.”

  “I’m simply grateful for the novelty,” Mike said.

  “I’d say the girls are, too, but all they see, they’re in the life, ’s the same cracked or mirrored ceiling. Well, each one to her trade.” Peekaboo got up and walked to the door; she waved over her shoulder at Mike.

  She turned back. “Last time I gave a man advice, he left me broke and bleeding. Kicked me out of the flat I was paying for, n’I went. Crawled into the gangway. Milkman found me, thought I was dead. May be I was.

  “After you been dead, everything’s easier. Isn’t it?”

  “Yes, it is,” Mike said.

  “I know it is,” Peekaboo said. “People say, someday, it starts to turn around. But the people say that, it seems, people it never happened to. People it happened to recognize each other. That’s why I say, black folks? Don’t need the color on our skin to suss each other out.”

  Peekaboo walked back to the table and poured herself a drink. “Yeah,” she said to herself, “. . . do it in the dark.” She moved the bottle toward Mike’s glass; he covered it with his hand. She batted his hand away.

  “You gonna drink or not?” she said. “Don’t fuck with me.” She poured his tumbler full. He drained it and walked to the back door.

  Mike opened the door, and stepped carefully into the small backyard. It was a paved area thirty by twenty feet. There was a low cement bench, up against the brick wall on the alley side. Had anyone ever been discovered sitting there, they would have been branded as an eccentric of a deviance to be shunned.

  On one corner of the bench was a heavy brass key. Attached to the key was a purple tassel. There was an oaken door set into the bricks.

  Mike used the key to open the door with the precise care of the inebriated. He passed into the alley, and relocked the door from the outside. He tossed the key back into the yard, and walked slowly down the alleyway.

  There was the sound of a far-off fire truck, and then another, moving from east to west. The sound rose as the trucks crossed Mike’s path, and then diminished. The alley gave onto Twenty-Third Street. Mike turned east, to walk toward the Lake.

  Out on the Lake three ore boats were steaming south, to the steel mills in Gary.

  Lake Michigan smelled like nothing else on Earth, Mike thought. It must have been the smell of home, for everyone gravitated to the Lake, and it was the Lake they thought of when they thought of home.

  He’d once spent a chaste summer night with Annie Walsh on the Point, at Fifty-Fifth Street on the Lake. Black and white families camped out there, summer nights, and Mike wrote that it was, for the South Side, the Waterhole, where the opposed were pleased to suspend hostilities. And the odd couple, waiting as long as they could, would retire under a blanket, all neighbors respecting the understanding that they were not there.

  Annie and he had eaten the picnic lunch she’d brought. And Mike had drunk the wine, and the two cups of coffee in the thermos bottle. She had lain in his arms, awake, until the sun came up, and then he took her home.

  That they had been to the Point was understood as both true and acceptable. Had they gone elsewhere, Mike would have been constrained to fabricate an excuse which all in her family would have known to be false. But the unspoken accord of the Fifty-Fifth Street Point extended to its use as an allowable excursion, its special status understood to depend on the truth of its invocation.

  When Annie first came to his apartment, she insisted on returning home alone.

  He never knew what excuses she made to her family, or if they demanded them or merely accepted, in anger, or in sorrow, or with resignation, her changed state.

  For, certainly, she was changed; and, loved, had become even more beautiful.

  Now every last thing stunned him into immobility: if it was better to light a cigarette or not, or have a cup of coffee, or go to the office, or leave the office. He remembered being able to decide these things, but not being unconsciou
s of the choice.

  In sober moments he recognized that this must be grief. It did not correspond, however, to any previous understanding of the term. He assumed, then, that he had not actually felt grief previously, upon either the deaths of his parents, or of his comrades, or of the enemy in France.

  He reasoned with himself that his sorrow over these deaths was one thing, and this was another—that the first was understandable as sadness, an otherwise familiar emotion, merely, in these cases, magnified. But his loss of the girl was, to him, quite another thing.

  Alcohol certainly helped.

  And Parlow helped, by drinking with him.

  He comprehended perfectly the concept that time would heal grief, but had lost all understanding of “time.”

  He decided to discover the murderers and kill them.

  He had killed in France, in the air, which he did not mind at all; and killed strafing ground troops, which upset him.

  And he had killed the observer in a Dornier, crashed just inside Allied lines, when he’d landed to strip the German plane of souvenirs.

  He’d put down some fifty yards behind the shattered plane, and approached it from the rear, holding his pistol. He saw the pilot had been thrown from the plane and was lying in that rag doll posture never assumed in life.

  He’d been walking forward, at once meditating on the transitory nature of things and mocking himself as a poseur, when he saw movement from the corner of his eye.

  It was the plane’s observer, slumped half out of his cockpit and swiveling the machine gun to point at him. He thought, as he watched, that it was strange that he had not heard the gun move on its rail. He saw the gunner’s chest explode, and was surprised to realize that he had shot him.

  He had no problem with death, and loved the notion of revenge, as the drunk loves the long-forgotten standby fifth of gin. But the thoughts would not stop. He knew that at some point they might lead him to resolution, but he had no notion when that point might be.

  The thoughts, he supposed, were grief. Or guilt, or the impenetrable admixture. For he could not figure his way out of his state. He had been wrong, he knew, in his intimacy with the girl, if, which he could not in conscience determine, he had not truly intended to marry her. For it was easy to say after the fact; but, had he actually so intended, why had he not done so?