Stephen Dixon - What Is All This? - Uncollected Stories

I phone the police from the kitchen, then yell from the backyard “Attention, neighbors who have backyards on these streets. A burglar, about ten minutes ago, broke into my mother’s apartment here and climbed over one of the connecting fences to get away, so turn on your yard lights and all your rear room lights and make sure your rear doors and windows are locked tight.”

I repeat the message and then return to my mother’s room and shake her shoulder. “Mom, it’s me, don’t worry,” and I tell her what happened. She puts on a robe, is very shaky and I have to hold her arm when she walks downstairs. I make us both a drink. We sit in the breakfast room while we wait for the police. It’s now her sitting room of sorts, where she embroiders and reads and watches TV. There used to be a table and eight chairs in here when the family had breakfast together every Sunday and dinner together almost every night.

She says This never used to happen on the block when you kids were growing up.”

“I know, I know.”

“We used to keep the front door unlocked during the day because of all you kids running in and out, and nobody but someone we welcomed or invited ever came in.”

“You started locking the front door about twenty years ago, when all of us were grown up or could be trusted with keys, but I get your point.”

“But double bars I didn’t have on these windows till three years ago, and only because a couple of neighbors got burglarized from the backyard, but the thieves still break in.”

“I’ll get more bars put on. Stronger ones. Maybe even gates, if you can overcome your aesthetic distaste for them, but you’ll be safe.”

“It’s not my safety I’m worried about. At my age, though I don’t want them here, they can come and go, so long as they don’t do it while I’m asleep. It’s just that I hate to see these things deteriorate the way they have, for everybody’s sake.”

“Your safety is important. You’re just talking like that because you’re flustered and upset. You’re healthy and can live lots of years yet, so we’re going to make it extra safe for you here. Unless you want to give up the place and come live with Marion and me.”

“Never. I like my privacy even more than you do. And we’d end up barely tolerating each other after a few months, and I’d probably sour your marriage a little besides. You will sleep over tonight, though, won’t you?”

“Sure. In the boys’ room. Marion would want me to. Then early tomorrow I’ll call the locksmith.”

The police come, write up a report and give us a prediction and statistic: we’ll never again see what was stolen and this was only one of an average of ten burglaries a day in this precinct.

One of the policemen picks up the silver candlestick and says This what you made your noise with to chase the kid away?” They already determined it was a strong man with a crowbar who pried the bars apart and a small wiry kid who slipped in. Think you would have used it on him like you did on the countertop?”

“I don’t know, now that you say it was a kid.”

“Even if it was a kid, you think he came empty-handed and wouldn’t have used his weapon on you, and believe me, he had one.”

Then I suppose I would have had to protect myself with this stick, though I wouldn’t have liked myself later on for doing it.”

“No,” my mother says, “I wouldn’t want you hitting any child, even if it meant he took everything from me.”

“Even if it meant he’d bash in your son’s brains protecting you?” the policeman says.

There are ways. There have to be. Talk, for instance. He was a junior high school teacher, so he knows how to talk to boys and girls.”

“ Talk . That’s years ago. When I was a boy, and I’ve got at least ten years on your son. Anyway, you’ll have to take it to a silversmith to get the dent out, if you can find one these days. Looks like an antique.”

“It is,” I say. “A wedding gift to my folks from my mother’s parents more than fifty years ago.”

“You want the truth after all this time?” my mother says. “I only told your dad that’s where they came from. It’s fifty years old, all right, but I bought the pair of them in a department store for myself so he’d think my parents were even more generous than they were.”

“He never knew?”

“Why would I have told him? It was only a harmless fib. Now it comes out because of this robbery and I don’t want to tell real lies for the policeman’s report. Otherwise, I would have kept it to myself for life.”

Hitler was coming to town and he wanted one of us girls. Young, he liked them young. “How young?” I asked the prostitute who told me this.

“Young like you,” she said. That’s what I heard from a friend of mine who’s still a prostitute in Berlin. She was in a house that Hitler went to — oh, that was a long time ago. Now he doesn’t go to houses. We just go to him and he or one of his aides selects. Anyway, he specified young — at least twenty years younger than him. That was ten years ago when he was first becoming our leader. Now it’s maybe thirty years younger than him — who knows? So you got a good chance to be the winner, sweetheart.”

“Did your friend say what he’s really like in person? Because I don’t think I could take doing it with such an incredibly powerful and famous man.”

“He’s all right.”

“She say that?”

“She didn’t say much. Just that she didn’t get him. She was already too old. And that he took the youngest girl in the house, who also happened to be the prettiest and best built, so nobody was sure if he picked her only for her being young or pretty or her build or what. She had big boobs, that’s what my friend said. Big and high and a tiny waist and hips that were in proportion to her breasts and long legs. And she was blond.”

“He prefers them blond too?”

“It’s difficult to say what he prefers. Remember, this is all secondhand. I don’t know what other houses he’s been to or if he’s changed his taste much in women since then, but he’s seen plenty of women, I understand. That’s what a general friend told me. Not a friend — a client, a one-shot deal. He came in here a couple of years ago for a supposed quickie and said before we did anything ‘You know what?’ I said ‘No, what?’ He said ‘Did you know I’m on Hitler’s personal general staff?’ I said ‘No kidding, that’s great.’ What else was I to say? He said ‘Wouldn’t you like to know what Hitler’s really like?’ I said ‘Yeah, yeah, tell me,’ because I could see he was aching to say it. I didn’t actually care then or now, but you do?”

“Well, yes, in a way. After all, he is Hitler. The leader of the entire continent. Maybe one of the greatest men ever.”

The hell with Hitler, and you know it. And the hell with all the continents he conquers — though don’t breathe a word to anyone I said any of this. Oh, go ahead. Tell the world — what do I care? I’ll say I never said it. No, that never works anymore. But I couldn’t give a toot what Hitler’s really like. Just give me my money, get your cookies, and go — next customer, please, know what I mean? But he was a general and, if he was telling the truth, on Hitler’s staff. And he had plenty of money to throw around also, so I said ‘Of course, I’ve always been eager to know. But he’s very nice, though, am I right? Sort of like a god.’ I said that to make sure he knew whose side I was on. He said ‘He’s a god like you say, but a real god.’ I could see he was having second thoughts, as if I might be an informer or so patriotic that I’d run out and blab if he said the least thing critical of Hitler. ‘You would like him,’ he said. ‘He goes for girls like you and makes them excited with his godlike qualities, and I’m not just talking about the spiritual and moral, you understand?’ ‘Not exactly,’ I said. ‘Because maybe I shouldn’t be telling you this, General, but I heard from a prostitute friend who’s now dead that he likes girls much younger than me — half his age, preferably — and with big parts in all the important places, no disrespect meant, is that true?’ He said ‘The cut of the female figure doesn’t matter to him so long as it’s perfect for him.’ Now that can almost mean nothing or two things, which can also be nothing if you can’t or don’t want to figure it out, so I dropped the subject. After, which is way after, for that was a weary old general who I think fought his greatest and maybe last battle on me and in the end won at an enormous sacrifice to himself, he said ‘Want to know what Hitler’s really like?’ I said ‘Didn’t you ask me that before?’ ‘Did I?’ he said, and I quickly said ‘No, it must have been someone else,’ for he seemed angry. He said ‘Who? You know people who are talking disparagingly about our great leader?’ ‘No, just some harmless lieutenant in the tank corps I saw a year ago.’ ‘You go to bed with lieutenants?’ he said. ‘No, I only overheard him downstairs when I was wandering through the main room looking for a lost brooch. Me, I save myself only for colonels and higher.’ Anyway, Hitler’s coming to town to check the military base, I suppose, and his first stop after he detrains is the Forest Hotel. We’re all to be in a room there when he or his aide comes in to make the choice. And no men for any of us till after the selection, as he wants the one who’s picked to be, at least for the time being, pure.”