Edith Pearlman - Binocular Vision - New & Selected Stories

The few people who saw Keith and Mitsuko waiting for the trolley that September morning assumed they were going off on a camping trip. Certainly they were properly outfitted, each wearing a hiker’s back frame fitted with a sleeping bag and a knapsack.

The most popular theory is that they have settled in some other part of the country. There they work — Keith with steel and flame, Mitsuko with the electronic will-o’-the-wisp; there they drink avocado shakes and read paperbacks.

Some fanciful townspeople whisper a different opinion: that when the Maguires shook our dust from their hiking boots they shed their years, too. They have indeed started again elsewhere, but rejuvenated, restored. Mitsuko’s little breasts are already swelling in preparation for the expected baby.

I reject both theories. Maiden lady that I am, I believe solitude to be not only the unavoidable human condition but also the sensible human preference. Keith and Mitsuko took the trolley together, yes. But I think that downtown they enacted an affectionate though rather formal parting in some public place — the bus depot, probably. Keith then strode off.

Mitsuko waited for her bus. When it came she boarded it deftly despite the aluminum and canvas equipment on her back. The sneakers — bright red, this time, as if they had ripened — swung like cherries from the frame.

“FAN MAIL!” brayed Paolo. “Come and get it.”

Every Monday and Tuesday Paolo lugged a canvas sack from the studio to the rehearsal room at the Hotel Pamona. Until recently Paolo had been Paul. The change in name was going to get Paul/Paolo strictly nowhere, in Joss’s opinion; but teenagers had to transform themselves every month or so — he had read that somewhere. Before dropping off the mail, Paolo picked up lunch for the television brass and brought it back to the studio. He told Joss that he hoped to become a comedian. The letters that came out of the sack smelled of deli. Some envelopes had greasy stains.

“Missives!” He swung the sack onto the round table in the corner, loosened its neck, and allowed some of the letters to spill out — fussy business, too many little motions; but Joss kept his mouth shut. He wasn’t in the coaching game. Besides, silence was what he got paid for.

Happy Bloom had been rehearsing his opening monologue — the one he delivered in a tuxedo, the one with the snappiest jokes — in front of the wide mirror between the windows. But when he saw Paolo he whirled, stamped, and called a recess. He loved his fans. He got quantities of letters, all favorable. He was “the New Medium’s New Luminary”— Time magazine itself had said so when it ran his picture on the cover the previous December. Churchill had been on the cover the week before, Stalin the week afterward, you’d think Happy had conferred with those guys at Yalta. But Happy was bigger than a statesman; he was an honorary member of every American family. On Thursday nights at five minutes to eight the entire nation sat down to watch The Happy Bloom Hour … And on Friday nights, as maybe only Joss knew, Heschel Bloomberg, wearing a gray suit and horn-rims — without greasepaint, without toupee, unrecognized — welcomed the Sabbath with the other congregants in a Brooklyn synagogue.

Joss admired the funnyman’s faith. Himself, he hadn’t been inside a church in eighteen years, not since the morning his daughter was baptized. But he had graduated from a Jesuit high school; he had believed in things then … “I like the routine in the shul, no improvising,” Happy told him. “The cantor’s a baritone, not bad if you like phlegm.”

The Heschel Bloomberg placidly worshipping on Friday night reverted to Happy Bloom on Saturday morning. Writing and rehearsals started at nine; he usually threw his first tantrum by ten. But today was Tuesday — the show already shapely, the skits established. There’d be only a couple of outbursts.

Now Happy settled himself at the table to devour his mail. Joss strolled over to one of the windows and breathed New York’s October air. Happy might snuggle with the country; he, Joss, belonged to this stony metropolis which kept forgetting his name — oh well.

“There’s a fan letter for you , Mr. Hoyle,” Paolo said, and did a Groucho with his eyebrows. He extracted a pale green square from the heap and walked it over to Joss, heel-toe, heel-toe, poor sap.

No return address on the envelope. Joss opened it. Slanted words lay on a page the color of mist. He brought the letter up to his nose. No scent.

Dear Mr. Jocelyn Hoyle,

I’m a big reader (though small in physique). Television leaves me absolutely frigid. I don’t ever watch hardly. Those wrestlers — shouldn’t they sign up at a fat farm? Happy Bloom smiles too much. Much too much too much.

But I admire your face. Your long mouth makes thrilling twitches. Your dark eyes shift, millimeterarily. Those eyes know hope. Those eyes know hope deferred. Those eyes know hope denied. Oh!

The Lady in Green

Joss looked up. “This is a fan?” he inquired of the city. He sniffed the paper again.

THE SECOND LETTER ARRIVED the next week, on show day, at the studio — they rehearsed there Wednesdays and Thursdays. Happy was screaming at the orchestra; at the properties-and-scripts woman, who held the whole enterprise together (she had a name but he called her “the Brigadier”); at the writers; at the cameramen; at Joss. Paolo came around, the sack of mail on his shoulder. Joss took the letter from Paolo and put it into his pocket, unopened.

The show went all right. They had a fading tenor for the next-to-last number leading into Happy’s windup monologue, the sentimental one. Joss stood listening to the tenor in what passed for the wings. The studio had some nerve calling this a stage, wires and cables all over the joint. He’d worked Broadway, rep, vaudeville; the worst house he’d ever played in had kept itself in better shape than the New Medium. The two circuses he’d traveled with were tight as battleships; well, circuses couldn’t afford bad habits … Nessun dorma , sang the has-been. He was at the point in his decline that Joss liked best: ambition flown; to hell with the high notes; emotion at last replacing resonance. He wore a tux and makeup but he might as well have been naked. Joss could sense the paunch under the corset, could imagine the truss, too — oh, the eternal sadness of fat men.

They all had a quick one afterward — Joss and the producer and the Brigadier drinking whisky, the tenor brandy, Happy his usual ginger ale. Then Joss ran down into the subway. Searching his pocket for a token, he found the letter.

Dear Mr. Hoyle,

Ho! I’ve found you! Id est, I looked you up in Who’s Who in American Entertainment. Also in newspapers in the New York Public Library.

You were born in 1903, in Buffalo. You’ve been an acrobat. So have I — in my dreams. You served in the armed forces during the War. You have a wife and a daughter.

Such calm lids, such haunted eyes. Your expression is holy.

I wonder where you went to college after that Jesuit high school. Who’s Who doesn’t say.

The Lady in Green

He’d been a poor boy, but they were all poor boys at the school. He liked every subject, history best. Father Tom’s breathless oratory made history alive. Father Tom’s eyes were green and moist, like blotting paper. The way the fathers lived, there behind the school … a quiet, chuckling sort of house, with Brother Jim their beloved fool. Joss, too, would teach someday, he thought then — history maybe. The fathers mentioned a scholarship to the state university. But he came to see that it was not Father Tom’s subject he loved, not even the teaching of it — it was the delivery. He loved jesting, too: not jokes like Brother Jim’s, not words at all, but glancing and byplay and pratfalls. He had joined a troupe right after graduation, disappointing his mentors and breaking his mother’s heart. Now this letter-writing individual wanted him to relive those times … In the late-night uncrowded subway car he stood up, briefly enraged, and shook himself, twitching in the black glass of the window like a marionette. The window threw back his face: the same face the lady had called holy. A man slid uneasily along the bench away from him.