The Old Religion Read online

  “What a fool I am,” he thought.

  The factory

  The fan fluttered the bookmark off his desk. He watched the bookmark, flat, climbing, and falling, as the fan swiveled to the other corner of the room.

  As it returned, the bookmark fluttered again, and rose, as if to fly. Then it fell back.

  Rogerson’s Stationery. 231 Main, Atlanta. Telephone: Maple 231.

  Everything for your Office Needs.

  And then the fan came back again.

  “What would it take,” Frank thought, “to flip it over? What’s printed on the reverse? I should know it. It lists, as I remember,” he thought, “various services, various goods, which they provide. Quite handy. Simple but true. One uses a bookmark. If that bookmark advertises a concern, we think of it each time we see the bookmark.

  “Each time,” he thought, “the fan returns in much the same way—making the allowance for the minute but inevitable wear inside the machine; making allowance, again, for the small but, I am sure, measurable shift of the fan along the desk—although it does seem fixed. Though the foam padding on its base no doubt reduces to near nil its motion. Even so,” he thought, “even so. Even so. If I left for a period of months, on my return would I not see the fan had shifted, slightly? If I had marked its position out, on my departure, would I not see, upon my return, that change? And if I could not measure it, would not an absence of years …” He cast his mind ahead, to a return to his office in decades, in centuries, in aeons, until a time when he would not be disappointed to find the fan yet unmoved.

  “For it must move,” he thought.

  “And if it moves, yes, even after the passage of centuries, if the passage of time shows it to have moved, then it must have been in motion all the time. For a measurable jump is nothing save the aggregate of these shifts we are incompetent to perceive.

  “And if the fan moves, then the bookmark must move. As I watch it, it does not move; it flutters and falls in what seems to me to be the same space. And, of course”—he shook his head sadly—“the situation will not and cannot endure as a laboratory experiment.” He shook his head and took a cigar from his humidor and lit it briskly, looking down at the bookmark, as at a recalcitrant and willful specimen of organism.

  “For change is inevitable,” he thought.

  “This office cannot endure. Civilizations themselves are found, buried under aeons of dust—though I do not conceive how sufficient time could pass, even over a length of time, granted, which I must find unimaginable, to obscure a fifteen-story building …”

  He consigned this thought—the question of the verity of the proposition that complete civilizations could be buried in dust—to that quality of things which both were and were not true.

  “How can we hope to know,” he thought, “if these things occur? If, in the very nature of the thing, we cannot live to see their outcome?

  “Nor,” he thought, rising forcefully to what he felt was clearly the true burden of the argument, “nor can we control all the variables.

  “Not only can we not suppose to live for that amount of time, but I am impotent even to control the entrance and egress to and from my office. Even should I say, ‘Miss Scholz, I wish no one to enter—even to clean—for some time.’” He nodded, meaning: “a reasonable request.”

  “‘… Neither to disconnect the fan. I wish it to run.’”

  He smiled ruefully.

  “Is there not, as we know, always that reason, either ignorant, good-, or ill-willed, to ‘interpret’ my instructions?”

  The bookmark skittered across the desk. He looked for the cause, and found it in the snap of the shade—in the one burst of breeze through the window.

  “No, no, all things must end,” he thought. He took the bookmark and placed it at the open page in the ledger—the left-hand entry completed. Date: Saturday, April 24, 1915. He dipped his pen and added the date of the next business day, Monday, April 26, at the top of the right-hand page. He blotted it and closed the ledger. He pushed it to one side of the desk, then brought it back and opened it again, and turned the bookmark to read: “Printing and binding, typist services, paper, ink, full ledger and bookkeeping services …”

  He nodded and replaced the bookmark, and closed the book.

  The shade snapped again. “Starched sound,” he thought. “Not a thing in the world wrong with that.”

  He walked to the window and looked down. The heat smelled, he thought, clean, from the fifth floor.

  “’S hot to walk up, but clean at this height,” he thought.

  The paper clip

  “But I could throw the paper clip away,” he thought. Why should I hesitate to save it? And is this a function of advertising; and, if so, of what is advertising a function?

  “For in what way is the paper clip on the letter I’ve received different from those in the box? Now,” he thought, “now: if I were the sort of man, or, barring and not going to that length, if I possessed,” he thought, “the habit”—he grinned—“of keeping the paper clips in the box in which they arrived—and why should I not, as it’s an attractive box (and, finally, the question is one of utility, which is to say, a man’s self-understanding of the world)—

  “Many would keep them in the box in which they came; and it is, arguably, defensibly (as if I required a defense) more prudent to do so. But, on the other hand, the box, over time, will wear down through my opening and closing it. And I assert—as if there were need of an assertion, and as if mere preference or habit (as I said before)—absent a conscious preference—did not suffice—

  “If I kept, as I say, the paper clips in the cardboard box, would it not, arguably, conduce more toward the waste of those clips I receive on the mail I receive?

  “Would it not, perhaps minimally but nevertheless, conduce to their waste, as one would then be less inclined to remove and to put them into a box full of—well, get on with it [he thought]—those which they did not match?”

  And here he relaxed; his inchoate, unacknowledged thought: “There, I’ve said it.

  “How far we come from ourselves,” he thought.

  “In the purchase of a receptacle for the clips I supply the impetus for their reuse. I decrease waste. I increase the beauty of my desk—but in truth, in all truth and finally, I do it, all of it, because I want to, and for no reason other or apart from that. And I may say ‘it suits me,’ or, ‘it suits my sense of fitness’, or, ‘I find it pleasant,’ or I may retreat one step and refer to the utility—for which I care not at all; not at all; not one jot—of the box.

  “For, yes, small habits are the foundations of large; and, yes, in a business with small margin the least savings not only aggregate but … but, one may say, the least savings are the only savings. What is there but the ‘least savings’?

  “How often do we move house, purchase new machinery, or strike new contracts with our suppliers or with our help?

  “No. No. Those things which we call ‘small’ and those which we call ‘large’ are, if we—”

  Here he was interrupted, as the girl came in.

  She showed him her time card, and he took the black box out and paid her, and she went away.

  “Now,” he thought, “I have bent the paper clip into a shape. I did it semi-consciously, because, I assume, the action itself was pleasing. And, having begun, I continued.

  “Now it is useless. I have fashioned it into nothing at all.”

  “You went,” the prosecutor said.

  “You went,” he said, “you went down to the basement. Following the girl, you called to her to turn, on some excuse—no doubt having to do with her pay. For she had rebuffed you—had she not? She had rebuffed you—how many times? And she had learned to shun you. And yet you called out, and she turned. And you pushed her down the stairs.” He paused. “And ravaged her.” He paused again, and shook his head, slowly. He cleared his throat. “And ravaged her. And beat her. And you took her life.”

  Frank looked up at the corner
of the room.

  The power of advertising

  He sat at his desk and looked down at the bag.

  “Now, that,” he thought, “is good advertising.

  “You see that and you remember it. You don’t forget something like that … the look of it, nor the message of it. For it is”—he thought of the word and wondered if it, in fact, existed, and, in the spirit of the object which he examined, elected boldly to employ it whether or no.

  “It is proclamative,” he thought. “Proclamatory. Unabashed, and I like it like that.”

  On the desk was an old bank bag of heavy burlap. Ten by fifteen inches, the corners reinforced with coarse, heavy leather.

  It closed with a drawstring sewn through the short end, and the drawstring ends drawn through a toggle the size of a poker chip. When the bag filled, the toggle would be pushed up against the bag, the string would be knotted tight up against it, and the knot sealed with wax. The toggle was of ocher gutta-percha. Pressed into it was the image of a hanged man and the motto “Wells Fargo Never Forgets.”

  “I would believe it,” he thought. “I would believe it; and, were I of a criminal bent, I would choose to exercise it upon some other concern. That is the power of advertising. To induce or persuade to forgo the process of deliberation and suggest there is a higher method of arriving at a solution—a more immediate and a better method. That is the power of advertising.”

  The end of the day

  And now his day was done. And it was quiet. The parade had ended, and he was alone.

  It occurred to him that, in the office, on those days when he was alone, when he did his correspondence himself, he would always tear, from the sheet, the exact number of stamps he required.

  Alone, on a Sunday, or on a Saturday afternoon, having completed his letters, having addressed them and sealed the envelopes, he would turn to the drawer and remove the buff folder which held the sheets of stamps. He would tear a crenellated block of stamps from the sheet—up and across, up and across—and when he turned his attention to paste them on the mail, whether he’d done five or ten or forty letters, he would find he had torn off that exact number of stamps.

  It pleased him. And then he would denigrate both his achievement and his pleasure, thinking, “This is not, as I would enjoy it, a sign of ‘election,’ no; but merely the logical expression of a skill practiced so many times as to’ve become automatic.

  “It would be remarkable,” he thought, “if, on the other hand, I were not able, unconsciously, to approximate the number of stamps.

  “Yes, yes. Yes, but,” a small voice said, “you’ve not approximated it. You have hit it exactly. As you do each time you perform the task.” It was this thought that nagged him, each time he approached the moment in the day when he would take out the buff folder.

  “I know I can do it,” he thought, “if and as long as I am ‘unconscious’ of it. And I know I can do it even conscious of the process; but I do not know if, conscious of the process and conscious of my pleasure—in that way which only can be vanity, which only can be idolatry (for have I not said that I do not ‘approximate’ but exactly fulfill the correct number? do I not discount my ability as quite normal and, at the same time, reserve the right to feel it … to feel it …” Here a small descant in his mind added the words with which he was loath to comfort himself: “a sign of election”…) “I do not know if in that case I can do it.”

  Sometimes he would will the number of stamps not to correspond with the number of envelopes. Infrequently this would occur.

  Then again, he would berate himself for the pleasure he felt.

  “As if,” he thought, “I now reward myself for contriving not merely achievement but randomness.”

  Finally, the meaning of the ceremony, he thought, was this: It came at the end of a perfect time.

  After a Saturday afternoon or a Sunday alone, or virtually alone, inside his office, in the factory—able to catch up on the elusive ends of the business, able to put his house in order. Somewhat at his leisure. Like a chef, he thought, perhaps: after the banquet. Ordering his kitchen.

  He cherished his time alone in the office. He felt it was a reward, a Sabbath, even though he was at work.

  He felt a sort of pleasant omnipotence in doing his own correspondence. In it he found leisure to contemplate and power to express.

  In it he stemmed the torrent of business and diverted it and made it run to a purpose and to his pace. And it all ran though him.

  And if he chose to rest, to look out of his window, to smoke a cigar, to lie down on the couch and smoke a cigar into the heat, his coat on a hanger in the press …

  If he rested the back of his shoes, above the heels, on the arm of the couch, his head low, the ashtray next to him, close by his left hand, down on the rug, his mind drifting to thoughts of that girl, of any girl, of girls like those in the mural in the club: high breasts, small boyish hips, no waist which could not be encompassed by his hands … And once he woke with a start, in a fantasy of fire, his back wet with the sweat of a too-deep summer nap.

  Well, then, the thing for that, as he well knew, the universal tonic, was iced coffee. And thank God for someone to run for it.

  What could be better than iced coffee, with just the merest drop of cream? And how he pitied those “unweaned,” as he thought of it, who took it one part coffee to two parts milk.

  Iced coffee. Just a drop of cream. No sugar, thank you, to exacerbate the heat of the day; a wet towel to wipe his neck, and then a dry one. The handkerchief from the side pocket folded in under the shirt collar.

  Then the coffee would come, and then he would have a cigarette, back at his desk, his correspondence almost done.

  It was a reward to order it into the stacks, the one of envelopes, the other of letters, then to reduce the two to one.

  One stack of correspondence, waiting for the stamps.

  And then the coda of the stamps. For the brief, anxious, but enjoyable byplay was just a leave-taking, was it not? Yes, he thought, it was. After which he would have to go home.

  The trial

  He had heard the Yiddish curse “May you be involved in a lawsuit when you’re right.” And now he understood it.

  He saw that the wrong side could and would allege anything, unbounded by the laws of probability or reason, while the legitimately injured side, the wrongly accused, could only allege the undramatic fact of its injury or innocence. The contest, the trial, was, finally, an entertainment, or a trial-by-entertainment, and that he, as the accused, no more enjoyed the presumption of innocence than had any unpopular man at any time.

  The trial, in his case, was an inversion of the formula: he was, more than assumed, more than adjudged (denied the possibility of error carried by that form), he was known to be guilty. He was guilty, and the trial existed to prolong his entertaining punishment, and to ratify that entertainment under another name.

  The Puritan Ethic led to the American hypocrisy of disavowing the need of pleasure. So pleasurable acts were called by the name of Service to Some Higher Good, their pleasurable nature denied, and that denial defended to the last—the gauge of a public act’s pleasurable component, in fact, could be said to be the extent to which its performance was decried as onerous.

  In 1854 a Jewish child in Bologna fell ill. His Catholic nurse, concerned for his immortal soul, secretly baptized him.

  The nurse confessed to her priest, and the Catholic hierarchy heard of the baptism. The boy recovered, but the Bishopric of Bologna, enraged that a now Christian child was being raised by Jews, had the boy kidnapped and hidden away.

  No pressure from the family, from friends, from the world Jewish community, from foreign heads of state, could cause the Church to produce the boy.

  Even to assert the family’s “right” was to give credence to an opposing view. But if there were not an opposing view, the kidnapping would have been stripped of its value as entertainment and stood simply as an obscene depredation.

 
And now he knew the meaning of the curse.

  Memory

  The whir of the fan when the girl had stood there became confused with other memory.

  The Rabbi had said that as one studies the Torah, as one reads the same portions at the same times of the year, year after year, one sees in them a change; but, as they do not change, it must be we who change.

  But each time he thought of the Saturday he thought of the girl, and it was always the same—the whir of the fan blowing the dress as she stood there and asked for her money.

  It blew the dress and, with it, an odor of uncleanliness.

  And was the smell magnified by time?

  For, at the time, he’d thought how he’d be hard-pressed to have sex with her, as she smelled unclean. That was the factor, then, perhaps, which buried the memory; for, when they’d come and asked him, “Do you know this girl?” he said that he did not.

  And when they said, “She works on the line,” he had not.

  “There are so many girls here,” he said.

  “Waal, this one is exceptionally pretty.”

  “Is she?” he said; and shrugged. Not to say, “I am beyond that,” but, he felt at the time, noncommittally; not to say, “You find her so. Perhaps I, being different from you, may not.” No.

  And not at all servile, no. Not saying, “You know that I cannot notice your young women,” but, he thought, as he looked back, measured, correct, circumspect, not unmindful that it was a—as he put it to himself—“difficult subject,” but with a certain dignity, he thought—rightly asserting his right not to be interested. He’d shrugged.

  “She was quite pretty,” the policeman had said—as if to assert, therefore, what, he thought: that any man would rape and kill her?

  No. He had shrugged. And he had not remembered her.

  Why had he been disgusted at her smell? Why had he, in fact, noticed her? For she was not that pretty.