Robert Silverberg - The Regulars

It was the proverbial night not fit for man nor beast, black and grim and howling, with the rain coming on in sidewise sheets. But in Charley Sullivan’s place everything was as cozy as an old boot, the lights dim, the heat turned up, the neon beer-signs sputtering pleasantly, Charley behind the bar, filling them beyond the Plimsoll line, and all the regulars in their regular places. What a comfort a tavern like Charley Sullivan’s can be on a night that’s black and grim and howling!

“It was a night like this,” said the Pope to Karl Marx, “that you changed your mind about blowing up the stock exchange, as I recall. Eh?”

Karl Marx nodded moodily. “It was the beginning of the end for me as a true revolutionary, it was.” He isn’t Irish, but in Charley Sullivan’s everybody picks up the rhythm of it soon enough. “When you get too fond of your comforts to be willing to go out into a foul gale to attack the enemies of the proletariat, it’s the end of your vocation, sure enough.” He sighed and peered into his glass. It held nothing but suds, and he sighed again.

“Can I buy you another?” asked the Pope. “In memory of your vocation.”

“You may indeed,” said Karl Marx.

The Pope looked around. “And who else is needy? My turn to set them up!”

The Leading Man tapped the rim of his glass. So did Ms. Bewley and Mors Longa. I smiled and shook my head, and the Ingenue passed also, but Toulouse-Lautrec, down at the end of the bar, looked away from the television set long enough to give the signal. Charley efficiently handed out the refills—beer for the apostle of the class struggle, Jack Daniels for Mors Longa, Valpolicella for the Pope, scotch and water for the Leading Man, white wine for Ms. Bewley, Perrier with slice of lemon for Toulouse-Lautrec, since he had had the cognac the last time and claimed to be tapering off. And for me, Myers on the rocks. Charley never needs to ask. Of course, he knows us all very well.

“Cheers,” said the Leading Man, and we drank up, and then an angel passed by, and the long silence ended only when a nasty rumble of thunder went through the place at about 6.3 on the Richter scale.

“Nasty night,” the Ingenue said. “Imagine trying to elope in a downpour like this! I can see it now, Harry and myself at the boathouse, and the car—”

“Harry and I,” said Mors Longa. “‘Myself’ is reflexive. As you well know, sweet.”

The Ingenue blinked sweetly. “I always forget. Anyway, there was Harry and I at the boathouse, and the car was waiting, my cousin’s old Pierce-Arrow with the—”

—bar in the back seat that was always stocked with the best imported liquors, I went on silently, just a fraction of a second ahead of her clear high voice, and all we had to do was drive ninety miles across the state line to the place where the justice of the peace was waiting—

I worked on my rum. The Leading Man, moving a little closer to the Ingenue, tenderly took her hand as the nasty parts of the story began to unfold. The Pope wheezed sympathetically into his wine, and Karl Marx scowled and pounded one fist against the other, and even Ms. Bewley, who had very little tolerance for the Ingenue’s silliness, managed a bright smile in the name of sisterhood.

“—the rain, you see, had done something awful to the car’s wiring, and there we were, Harry on his knees in the mud trying to fix it, and me half-crazy with excitement and impatience, and the night getting worse and worse, when we heard dogs barking and—”

—my guardian and two of his men appeared out of the night—

We had heard it all fifty times before. She tells it every horrid rainy night. From no one else do we tolerate any such repetition—we have our sensibilities, and it would be cruel and unusual to be forced to listen to the same fol-de-rol over and over and over—but the Ingenue is a dear sweet young thing, and her special foible it is to repeat herself, and she and she alone gets away with it among the regulars at Charley Sullivan’s. We followed along, nodding and sighing and shaking our heads at all the appropriate places, the way you do when you’re hearing Beethoven’s Fifth or Schubert’s Unfinished, and she was just getting around to the tempestuous climax, her fiancé and her guardian in a fight to the death illuminated by baleful flashes of lightning, when there was a crack of real lightning outside, followed almost instantly by a blast of thunder that made the last one seem like the sniffle of a mosquito. The vibrations shook three glasses off the bar and stood Charley Sullivan’s frame photos of President Kennedy and Pope John XXIII on their corners.

The next thing that happened was the door opened and a new customer walked in. And you can imagine that we all sat to attention at that, because you would expect only the regulars to be populating Charley’s place in such weather, and it was a genuine novelty to have a stranger materialize. Well timed, too, because without him we’d have had fifteen minutes more of the tale of the Ingenue’s bungled elopement.

He was maybe thirty-two or a little less, roughly dressed in heavy-duty Levis, a thick black cardigan, and a ragged pea jacket. His dark unruly hair was soaked and matted. On no particular evidence I decided he was a merchant sailor who had just jumped ship. For a moment he stood a little way within the door, eyeing us all with that cautious look a bar-going man has when he comes to a new place where everyone else is obviously a long-time regular; and then he smiled, a little shyly at first, more warmly as he saw some of us smiling back. He took off his jacket, hung it on the rack above the jukebox, shook himself like a drenched dog, and seated himself at the bar between the Pope and Mors Longa. “Jesus,” he said, “what a stinking night! I can’t tell you how glad I was to see a light burning at the end of the block.”

“You’ll like it here, brother,” said the Pope. “Charley, let me buy this young man his first.”

“You took the last round,” Mors Longa pointed out. “May I, Your Holiness?”

The Pope shrugged. “Why not?”

“My pleasure,” said Mors Longa to the newcomer. “What will it be?”

“Do they have Old Bushmill here?”

“They have everything here,” said Mors Longa. “Charley has everything. Our host. Bushmill for the lad, Charley, and a double, I think. And is anyone else ready?”

“A sweetener here,” said the Leading Man. Toulouse-Lautrec opted for his next cognac. The Ingenue, who seemed to have forgotten that she hadn’t finished telling her story, waved for her customary rye and ginger. The rest of us stood pat.

“What’s your ship?” I asked.

The stranger gave me a startled look. “Pequod Maru, Liberian flag. How’d you know?”

“Good guess. Where bound? D’ye mind?”

He took a long pull of his whiskey. “Maracaibo, they said. Not a tanker. Coffee and cacao. But I’m not going. I—ah—resigned my commission. This afternoon, very suddenly. Jesus, this tastes good. What a fine warm place this is!”

“And glad we are to see you,” said Charley Sullivan. “We’ll call you Ishmael, eh?”

“Ishmael?”

“We all need names here,” said Mors Longa. “This gentleman we call Karl Marx, for example. He’s socially conscious. That’s Toulouse-Lautrec down there by the tube. And you can think of me as Mors Longa.”

Ishmael frowned. “Is that an Italian name?”

“Latin, actually. Not a name, a sort of a phrase. Mors longa, vita brevis. My motto. And that’s the Ingenue, who needs a lot of love and protection, and this is Ms. Bewley, who can look after herself, and—”