Stanley Elkin - Criers & Kibitzers, Kibitzers & Criers

Less embarrassing, but duller, were our talks when Lesley’s sister returned to school after a vacation at home. She had total recall about her brother and she would come, her mind brimming with anecdotes of Lesley, to tell me of some new suit he’d bought, of what humorless thing he had said to the clerk when they went together to shop for it. She spoke of Lesley’s disappointment in the advertising agency he’d taken a job with after graduation, of vague plans he had to return to school to study law, of his new girl friend who was always, in his sister’s description of her, not beautiful, but sensible . Sometimes she would offer a picture of an anonymous, almost featureless girl in health shoes. Invariably the girls looked feckless, tired.

What bothered me most in all this was the picture I got of Lesley’s horribly distorted picture of himself. I knew him to be completely without humor, massively stolid, as though the imagination were a finite organ which he, somehow, had been born without. Yet his view of himself as revealed to me through his sister was romantic — there is no other word for it — cavalier. Advertising. Law. In his letters to his sister, Lord Chesterfield.

Then, in her last year at the university, his sister came to tell me that Lesley had joined the Marines. I was astonished. Our family, not even counting Lesley, is not what you could call a United States Marine family. Ours is more a Certified Public Accountant family. We seem to have been born between wars. For Lesley deliberately to seek out the Marines struck me as an incredible gesture, almost heroic, a declaration that though it would cost him dearly, he must assert ultimately and irrevocably what he had long and mistakenly felt himself to be. For the Marines to accept him was no less impressive. It seemed crazily reciprocal, and in the instant that his sister told me about it I had a senseless vision of two forces — expansive, drunkenly generous.

After this, Lesley’s sister came to me even oftener, but the tone of the visits and of her manner changed.

Before, she had been enthusiastic, quickened with optimism at her brother’s impossible plans for himself. Now she was clearly not so sure, saddened, and though she still carried Lesley’s letters in the clumsy pocketbook which self-consciously she held, guarding herself, against her foolishly large breasts (once I said to her, “What have you got there anyway?”), she no longer quoted directly from the letters, but instead gave long rambling resumes of what he had written. I got the impression that he must have been very lonely. Once she showed me a picture of Lesley in his Marine uniform. He looked startled, bewildered, like someone who had gotten lost while swimming.

When she spoke of her brother now she always prefaced his name with the adjective “poor.” “In Chicago I saw a movie with my parents,” she’d say. “Poor Lesley would have liked it. One thing about the service though, poor Lesley says they get all the latest pictures. Even before downtown.” Or, “Poor Lesley’s in Tokyo now. He says there’s a place he can get kosher food whenever he wants. He says there are lots of Japanese Jewish people who eat lox and rolls and they’ve got this delicatessen on the Ginza Strip. Poor Lesley says you have to take your shoes off when you go inside.” I got the idea that she used the word superstitiously, as though by openly insisting on Lesley’s helplessness nothing would come of it.

I even had a theory about the origin of that word. I think that sometime, on one of her holidays in Chicago, she and her mother and her father and her grandfather who lived with them must have sat down to dinner. The maid must have brought in the main dish. I like to think it was chicken. On its steaming platter, set down at the center of the table, the golden chicken, snug in its brown-potatoed insularity, luxurious as old gold against the thick white cloth, glowed like a household god in the awed silence. Someone, perhaps the grandfather, must have said, “Such chicken! Poor Lesley would have liked such chicken.”

I was reminded, on my visit home, when my mother showed me the photograph, of my feelings as a boy in high school when I learned that Lesley and his family were coming to The Bronx for a visit.

I remember my fears of introducing Lesley to my friends — the lousy people. They would kill him, I thought. They would take my cousin, that stiff-necked wonder, and destroy him.

What I have to say is very hard. My crowd — and I don’t mean that old gang of mine, kids with holes in their gym shoes — my friends had a thing . I don’t know if I had it too. All I had, I think, was a feeling for this thing. But they had it, whatever it terribly was — an esprit de corps beyond rationality, or a sense of neighborhood run riot, or merely a kind of fatal intuition — and it made them wild. I’m not talking about delinquency. They didn’t steal. There was nothing to steal. There was no one to steal it from. What they already had was all they needed. What they had was — there’s no real name for it— personality , out-sized, grotesque, collective. Look, they didn’t have jobs with a future; they didn’t date girls; they didn’t apply themselves; they didn’t know anybody’s line-up, and they didn’t care. They weren’t rooters. In all that crowd there wasn’t one flat, half-hearted cheer between them. But anything could break them up. There was this little girl who’d come into the candy store at exactly the same time every afternoon and say to Fein, the owner, “Mr. Fein, my mother please wants a package of Chesterfield cigarettes and that you should put away a late edition of a World-Telegram which my brother will pick it up later,” and one of my friends would start laughing. And pretty soon they’d all be laughing, myself too. I don’t know why it was funny. It was, though.

But they were wild, and even dangerous, flashing out with sudden viciousness at passing, solemn strangers or at each other. I don’t know, it was as though they sensed something terrible about the world.

When Lesley came I introduced him around.

“How come you’re so fat?” Danny Lubell asked him.

Lesley answered as though this were a perfectly normal question, one asked him frequently. “I’m not fat,” he said. “I’m big-boned.”

“You’re monstrous-boned,” Danny said, “but you’re fat too.”

Lesley looked at him without smiling or even seeming to realize that he had been insulted. Often something would happen to Lesley — in college he might fail a course; a girl would rebuff him — and you thought, now, now he will question himself, now he’s going to realize what he is. But he never did.

We were in front of the candy store and just then a stray cat, looking ill at ease in the street, as though it had drunkenly wandered from its alley home, and now, sober, could not find it, sulked by.

“Hey, Lesley, there’s my cat. Did you ever see my pussy cat?” Danny said.”

“Is that really your cat?” Lesley asked, mildly put off by its unkemptness.

“Sure it’s my cat. Whose cat do you suppose it is? You see the special scientific color of the fur? That’s years of careful breeding. The cat books call that ‘Scientific Colored Pussy-Cat Fur.’ That’s some cat, ain’t it, Belgium?” He had turned to Joey Stowka, a refugee kid Danny called Belgium.

Joey blushed and did not answer.

Danny reached down suddenly and grabbed the cat, catching it skillfully around its belly. Its claws burst from the furred paws, its face contorted in rage. Danny made a feint with the cat, as if he were going to throw it at Lesley. Lesley stood stolidly, not even throwing up his hands in reflex.

“All right, all right,” Danny said to the cat, calming it. He turned to Lesley. “Want to stroke its special pussy-cat fur?”