J. Powers - The Stories of J.F. Powers

“If I was sober…”

Then, accounting for his long exile in the washroom, he dislodged from his coat pocket a newspaper, folded editorial page out, and threw it with a sigh across the mahogany bar. He sat down in the empty fourth chair at the card table. This, too, seemed to be foreordained. The fat one dealt him in without comment. Emil laid down his cards, disappeared into the kitchen, and returned with a cup of something, probably black coffee. The stocky man received it silently, his just due, and drank. He put the cup, wobbling, down and said:

“If I was sober…”

“Irish,” I said.

“An age-old alliance,” Renner said. “The Irish and the Germans.”

There was, in fact, a rough unity about them. The fat one and the Entrepreneur thrust themselves in and seemed to maintain their positions with a forcefulness suggesting fear. Emil, with whom cordiality was a method, never granted a more confidential glance to one than to another, and by the very falsity of his servility distinguished himself as a strong character. The stocky Irishman, who had pleasant puffy eyes and vigorous wattles, loomed up as a most accomplished fact. He was closer to the furniture than the others, a druid. While the fat one and the Entrepreneur experienced mortal joy and sorrow, according to their luck at cards, and Emil dealt nervously in camaraderie, the Irishman was satisfied to be present and one with the universe. One thing was sure: they all belonged .

Emil sacrificed his place at the card table and plied efficiently among his patrons. He brought us beer, the cardplayers drinks and matches, and Mr Ross delicacies and homage. When Emil came by the cardplayers’ table, I heard them urge him to get through with the carriage trade. That could mean only Mr Ross, for he was being smiled and grunted at among them. They could tell that he had a romantic concept of the place. It was celebrated now and then by broken book reviewers as the erstwhile hearth of the nation’s literary great. Perhaps poor, tweedy Mr Ross was drunk with longing for a renaissance in letters and took the cardplayers for poets. They, I suspected, were all worried about how Mr Ross made his money where he’d just come from and aggravated to think (the Jews got all the money!) he’d be going back to make more when he left. It seemed to pain Renner that Mr Ross could confide in Emil and permit him clucking around his table.

Renner breathed over his empty glass and resumed his autobiography. Some middle chapters seemed to be missing, for we were in New York in 1939. “Some employment agencies had signs saying sixteen or seventeen dishwashers wanted. I just stood in the doorway and the agent waved his hand — No! Others, too; one look at me and — No! They’re very good, they know their business, the agents.”

“What about teaching?”

“ Ja , sure. That was interesting, too. ‘Of course you’ve taught for years at the University of Vienna’”—Renner reproduced a stilted voice and I knew we were at an interview he must have had—“‘but surely you must know that what counts in this country is a degree from Columbia, Harvard, or here, the only schools for political science. I thought everyone knew that. I suggest you try one of the smaller schools.’

“So I tried one of the smaller plants. I went to a teachers’ agency and eventually entered into correspondence with a Midwestern college. ‘It is true’”—here was another, more nasal voice—“‘that there is an opening on our staff for a qualified man in your field, but it is true also that it will remain vacant till doomsday before we appoint a tobacco addict, especially one constrained to advertise that sorry fact.’ A veiled reference,” Renner laughed, “to the pipe in the snapshot I sent.”

“American Gothic,” I said.

“Just as well,” he said. “I was through with teaching when I left Europe. Too much guilt connected with it. Although clergymen and educators are not so influential as might be supposed from pulpits and commencement addresses, and the real influences are the grocer, the alderman, the radio comedian (and of course the men who pay them), still that’s pretty shabby exoneration…”

I noticed that Renner had become angry and disheveled. Poor Renner! It was his wife’s lament that nothing roused him. She had made herself an enemy to the Heimwehr in Vienna and been forced to leave Austria long before the Nazis arrived, bringing their own brand of fascism to the extermination of the local product. Renner had stayed on, however, reading in the cafés (he’d lost out at the University through his wife’s activities) and thinking nothing could happen to him — until everything did. His wife, in judging him lethargic, was wrong in the way such vigilant people can never detect. Renner, I believe, was only insensitive to political events, to the eternal traffic jams of empires, and felt it was hardly his fault that he lived when and where he did in time and space. If he had been a boy, he would not have believed he might someday be President, nor even have wished it.

I could understand from this what he meant when he said, in one of his extravagant statements, that he loved horses and foxes and could not forgive the English for what they do to both. Those were the symbols he chose through which to make himself known (at least to me), although it was by no means certain that they were only symbols to him. When he spoke of foxes and horses it was with no shade of poetry or whimsey or condescension. His face became intense and I could easily imagine him in a kind of restricted paradise: just foxes, horses, himself, and a lot of Rousseau vegetation. Of all the animals, he said, only the horse lives in a state of uninterrupted insanity.

Renner took a large swallow from his glass and set it down with a noise. “For nineteen hundred years they’ve been doing that.”

“Who? What?”

“Plato’s learned men. Capitulating. I say nineteen hundred years, though it’s longer, because Christ cut the ground from under them — the Scribes and Pharisees of old. He gave us a new law. Martyrdom, indecent as it sounds to our itching ears, is not supposed to be too much to suffer for it.”

“Speak for yourself, Renner,” I said.

“Aren’t you a Christian?”

“Of course. But my idea of Christianity is the community fund, doing good, and brisk mottoes on the wall.”

“Copulating with circumstance,” Renner said.

I looked at the cardplayers and there they were, overwhelming aspects of human endeavor: the fat one and the Entrepreneur throwing themselves soulfully into their best cards, the table dumbly standing for it, the Irishman piled up warmly and lifelessly, except for his fingers flicking the cards and his eyes which blinked occasionally, keeping watch over the body. I caught Emil’s eye, which he proceeded to twinkle at me, and he came over for our glasses. Renner kept his eyes down and so I was stuck with meeting Emil’s smile. I could not bring myself to return it. I told him the beer was good, very — when he waited for more— very good beer. When he came from the bar with our glasses filled he explained in detail how the beer came to be so good and did his smile until I felt positively damp from it.

“A little tragedy took place in our department this afternoon,” Renner said, after Emil had gone. “Victoria Marzak versus the super”—for whom Renner indicated the Entrepreneur; I was confused until I remembered their heads were alike. “It was three acts, beginning with Victoria giving the super hell because working conditions are so bad in the stock rooms (which they are). She delivered a nice little declaration of independence. I thought the day had finally arrived. The workers of the world were about to throw off their chains and forget their social security numbers. The super said nothing in this act.